


The Seven Lives of Stiles Stilinski

by glorious_spoon



Series: The Time Traveler's Werewolf [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Banter, Canon-Typical Violence, Curses, First Time, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Pining, Post-Canon, Rescue Missions, Scott McCall is a Good Friend, Snark, Sterek Reverse Bang, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-05-31 18:40:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15125540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: Stiles disturbs an abandoned temple and catches the attention of a goddess of time and fate. When he starts time-traveling involuntarily through the past, he's not sure if she means it as a curse or a lesson--but no matterwhenhe travels to, he always seems to end up at Derek's side.Written for the 2018 Sterek Reverse Bang.





	1. Calling You from the Future

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Green](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Green/gifts).



> This is very loosely inspired by _The Time Traveler's Wife_ by Audrey Niffenegger and by [Green's](http://yogi-bogey-box.tumblr.com/) awesome [fanmix for the Sterek Reverse Bang 2018](http://yogi-bogey-box.tumblr.com/post/175503518699/playlist-for-the-sterek-reverse-bang-it-inspired%22). Go check it out and give her some love!
> 
> (She also made the sweet cover art for this story--seriously, she's awesome).
> 
> A big thank you to [Scared_Beings_in_the_Dark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scared_Beings_in_the_Dark) ([1989dreamer](http://1989dreamer.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr) for beta work; all remaining mistakes are my own.

 

* * *

 

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Scott asked, pushing aside a veil of cobwebs to reveal the carved stone wall beneath.

Stiles could read maybe a quarter of the script, thanks to the brutally intensive crash-course on ancient languages that Lydia had inflicted on him before she left for England last semester, but not enough to make out anything coherent. It probably wasn't actually safe to go in, but it still beat getting eaten alive. He glanced back at the hill behind them, but it was empty. For now. “Considering the alternative?”

Scott made a face, shadowed in the thin beam of the flashlight. “Point taken.”

“I told you we should have waited until Derek was back in the country to investigate.” Stiles squinted at the lines of carved text. There was a thin seam down the middle that he hoped was a door— that he _really_ hoped he could open. “I specifically remember telling you this was a bad idea.”

“Can we save it until we’re not about to be devoured?” Scott asked, peering over his shoulder. “You have the key?”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure…” Stiles trailed off, thumbing through the notebook. Should have brought a tablet. His own handwriting was an illegible chicken-scratch in the uncertain light of the Maglite in Scott’s hand. “I knew I should have typed this up.”

“Stiles, we don’t have _time_ for this. Can you open it or not?”

“No, yeah, I can definitely open it,” Stiles said absently, running a finger down the line of text. “I’m just not sure if…”

“You’re not sure if _what?_ ”

“Hmm,” Stiles said, reaching for the purse of herbs in his back pocket. “Hang on a second. Hold the light steady.”

Scott made a frustrated noise, but he held the flashlight up and didn’t even flinch when the howls echoed across the desert behind them. They were definitely closer, harsh and alien, like nails on a chalkboard and nothing like something that a living throat could make.

Stiles really kind of missed the days when werewolves were the scariest things that were likely to be chasing him through the wilderness.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I think I got it.”

“I _hope_ you’ve got it,” Scott said through gritted teeth. “Because I’m not sure I can outrun those things. And I know you can’t.”

“Rub it in, why don’t you,” Stiles mumbled, shoving the notebook back into his backpack and reaching for the pen knife he kept in his jeans pocket.

“Uh. What are you doing?”

“Getting us into the temple,” Stiles said, flipping the blade open. It gleamed ominously in the dim light of the desert moon. “Unless you have a better idea. Believe me, I’m open to suggestions.”

“No, but Stiles, are you sure—”

“God, please don’t try to talk me out of it, this is bad enough already.” Another chorus of howls. They were getting closer, and he was pretty sure that there were more of them now. He hadn’t gotten a good look at them on the hillside earlier, but his imagination had plenty of raw material to supply a whole host of horrifying images. Enough, at least, to get him past the initial flinch of slicing open his own palm. He sucked in a sharp breath across his teeth, and slammed his bleeding hand against the carved stone wall.

For several horrible moments, there was nothing. Just his palm scraping the rough stone, the howls coming closer and closer, Scott breathing rough and uneven over his left shoulder—

—and then the solid stone wall melted away like mist and sent them tumbling into a cavern of darkness.

His back hit the cold floor, Scott a heavy glancing weight beside him, and then the wall slammed back into being above them. “Okay, well, they’re definitely not getting in here.”

“Great,” Scott said, into the stuffy darkness of the temple. “So how do we get out?” 

* * *

 The answer to that turned out to be, ‘wait until Deaton shows up twelve hours later with a supernatural armory’, but that was okay. There was Malia, who kissed Scott squarely on the lips before yanking them both up the steps, and Deaton, who was standing at the top of the stairs with a gore-splattered and faintly glowing machete in one hand and a reassuringly judgmental expression on his face, and everything was great until they were halfway back to Beacon Hills and Stiles started to turn translucent.

“What the hell,” Scott said, his hands skating over Stiles’s shoulders and arm, his eyes huge. “What the _hell_ is happening to him—”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” The car swerved wildly as Malia leaned her entire body into the back seat, hands still on the wheel and the empty highway spooling toward them at a worrying clip.

“For the love of God, pull over,” Stiles yelped, and then the world was going strangely transparent around him. Scott’s hand skidded over his arm, then slipped _through_ his skin, and then he was— gone.

* * *

He woke up in mid-air, an instant before his head slammed into the pavement.

“Ow, fuck,” he groaned, rolling onto his side and blinking the spots from his vision. And then, as awareness of his surroundings started percolating in, he added, more vehemently, “ _Fuck._ ”

The last thing he’d been aware of was speeding down an empty California highway in the back seat of Deaton’s sensible little SUV. Now—

Now he was sprawled out on icy pavement, towering buildings all around. It was night, and it was approximately fifty degrees colder than it had been a minute ago.

Stiles pushed himself upright with a groan and looked around. Night, tall buildings, pavement, lights everywhere and a rush of people. Nothing looked the least bit familiar. He had no idea where he was.

“Hey, get out of the road, asshole!”

A horn blared, and there was the roar of an engine, several voices rising in a chorus of yells—

—and a strong hand wrapped around his arm and yanked him back out of the street. He stumbled and fell back against a warm, solid body, heart pounding, as a yellow cab drove over the space where he’d just been laying.

“Oh, holy God, dude, thank you,” he gasped, turning toward his rescuer, and then he stopped, did a double take. “Derek?”

Derek’s face— because yeah, that was Derek Hale, large as life and twice as scowly— went through an inexplicable series of expressions, and then he took a step back, shoved Stiles off of him, and said flatly, “What.”

“Oh, man, Derek, you have no idea how glad I am to see you. Do you know what’s going on? Because this is the most insane thing that’s happened to me since the ghost riders. We were just—”

Derek took another step back, suspicion settling on his face like a mask. There was something different about him. He was clean-shaven in a way that Stiles hadn’t seen in years, but that wasn’t it, or at least it wasn’t all of it. Stiles was still trying to puzzle that out when Derek shook his head abruptly and said, “Who the hell are you, and how do you know my name?”

“What?”

“Who are you,” Derek repeated, enunciating sharply, “and how do you know my name?”

Stiles stared at him. “Okay, please tell me this is just really a poorly-timed joke. I’m so not in the mood for it. I think I’m accidentally teleporting, and I don’t even know where the hell we are right now.”

“I don’t know you,” Derek snapped. He paused, looked around. The sidewalk was far from empty, and though almost everybody seemed to be in a hurry— probably to get inside, out of the cold, seriously it was fucking freezing and the t-shirt that had been just fine for a Southern California August was doing nothing for him right now— there were a few curious faces turned toward them. Derek cursed under his breath, and then his hand was on Stiles’s arm again, grip ungentle as he steered him toward— oh, great, a dark alley, this was awesome.

“You do know me, you so do,” Stiles said, stumbling after him. He didn’t bother trying to yank his arm away; it would have been futile in any case. “You’re Derek Hale, you’re from Beacon Hills, California, my name is Stiles— any of this ringing a bell? Dude, did you lose your memory again? Because—”

“I _don’t know you_ ,” Derek repeated, and shoved him against the alley wall hard enough to hurt before finally letting go of his arm. “So start explaining, or else.”

“Or else what,” Stiles snapped, abruptly fed up. “What, you expect me to believe that you’re going to beat me up just for knowing your name? Tear my throat out with your teeth? You’re an asshole, but you’re not that scary, mister Big Bad Wolf.”

Derek didn’t just pause at that, he froze, a looming statue in black leather silhouetted against the night.

“What did you just say?” he growled, and for the first time Stiles felt a frisson of actual fear go through him. The thing was, Derek had been so good lately about acting like a civilized person with a functioning set of social skills that Stiles had actually sort of forgotten how flat-out fucking terrifying he could be when he felt like it.

The other thing was, though, that being flat-out fucking terrified had never once been enough to shut Stiles up. He lifted his chin, looked straight at Derek’s icy glare, and said, “Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention the werewolf thing?”

There was another growl, this one almost subsonic, before it cut off. “You’re a hunter.”

“What?” Stiles said. “Uh, _no_. I’m pack, you asshole. Part of your pack, at least when you stick around long enough to participate. Which you haven’t been recently. Too busy rescuing orphans and saving the world, or whatever it is you’re up to these days.”

Derek’s face twisted at that, and he took a step back, then another. “You’re human,” he spat. “And I don’t have a pack anymore.”

He turned on his heel and stalked out of the alley, and Stiles gaped after him for a good fifteen seconds before it occurred to him to follow. He had to jog to catch up, winding his way through the bustling crowd of jacket-clad people. It seemed like the exercise should have warmed him up, but his skin still felt like it was encased in ice, and was that _snow_ coming out of the sky? That was totally snow. Where the hell were they that it was snowing in August?

If it was even still August anymore. Which it probably wasn’t, actually. What a wonderful thought.

“Okay, seriously, Derek, wait up,” he panted, spotting Derek’s broad, leather-clad back through the crowd. “I know you can hear me, asshole.”

Derek slanted a glare in his direction, but he didn’t slow, not even when Stiles caught up to him. There was still no sign of recognition in his expression. Derek hadn’t forgotten who _he_ was, that much was obvious, but he didn’t remember Stiles. And the last time that had happened was—

The ghost riders. Fucking _fuck._

“Great,” Stiles said out loud, and Derek glanced at him again. “No, never mind, I know you don’t remember me, trust me, we know each other. Have there been any weird lightning storms here lately?”

“It’s November,” Derek said flatly.

November. Three months, he’d apparently lost. Awesome. Just awesome. “So that’s a _no_ , right?”

“It’s a _go away and leave me the hell alone_ ,” Derek said, and picked up his pace.

“You know, the attitude is so not necessary, I thought we were past this. I mean, even if you don’t remember me, we were doing so well with the whole ‘civilized behavior’ thing, and…”

He trailed off, his steps slowing.

At first, he wasn’t sure what had caught his attention. There was a kiosk on the sidewalk, the elderly proprietor so bundled up against the cold that all Stiles could see of him was a tuft of gray hair and a wind-chapped brow. The guttering yellow light overhead illuminated a sad collection of battered-looking candy bars and fashion magazines, Coke cans and no-brand water bottles, and a newspaper holder containing a few copies of the New York Times.

 _ **OBAMA**_ , blared the headline. _RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN DECISIVE VICTORY._

Wait. _What?_

Stiles drifted closer, suddenly unable to care that Derek was getting farther and farther away. He reached out and touched the headline with fingers that were trembling from more than just the cold. The smooth newsprint seemed solid enough beneath his fingers as he trailed them over the date stamp. _WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 05, 2008_.

“What,” Stiles said out loud, “the hell.”

“Hell of a thing, ain’t it?” asked the guy behind the counter, and grinned when Stiles jumped about a mile in the air. “Personally, I voted for McCain, but my daughter, she loves him. Damn kids. You gonna buy that?”

“What?” Stiles said again.

“The paper. You gonna buy it? Two bucks.”

“No,” Stiles said blankly. “Thanks. I, uh. Thank you.”

“Suit yourself,” the guy said. “You want my advice though, give up the speed.”

“What?”

“Gets ya thinkin’ you’re immortal or something, but let me tell you, kid, you’ll freeze to death like that just as quick even if you can’t feel it.” He snorted and turned back to the tiny TV playing a rerun— or, shit, maybe _not_ a rerun— of _Criminal Minds_.

Stiles shook his head, backing away, and squinted for Derek in the crowd. After a few moments, he caught sight of the back of a dark head and broad shoulders at the far end of the block, but then a bus roared by and he was lost from sight.

Well, there was the silver lining, anyway. This wasn’t the Wild Hunt. Derek hadn’t forgotten him; Derek was, what, nineteen years old right now? Twenty? That meant that they had about three years to go before the first time he’d terrorize Stiles for trespassing on his property. They’d never met.

Still, Derek was the only remotely familiar thing around, so Stiles broke into a jog, squinting up ahead and hoping like hell that he hadn’t taken a turn onto some side street and disappeared from view forever.

He was so intent that he didn’t realize the world was fading around him, the sound of the street going muffled, until he put his foot down and felt a sudden nothingness where the pavement should have been. He windmilled his arms, let out a yelp that no one else seemed to hear, and then he was falling into darkness.

* * *

This time, he landed flat on his back on rough, sandy soil, and three worried faces immediately loomed into his field of vision, silhouetted against a dry blue sky.

“What year is it?” Stiles gasped as soon as he managed to drag air into his lungs.

Scott exchanged a long, worried look with Malia, then looked back at Stiles, his brow furrowed. “Um. 2016?”

“August?”

Scott nodded slowly.

“Oh thank God,” Stiles said, letting out an explosive breath. “How long was I gone?”

The three of them exchanged another, longer glance. This time, it was Deaton who answered. “Not long. Fifteen minutes, maybe. What happened?”

Stiles dropped his head back against the ground and scrubbed a hand over his face, thinking of the wintery streets of what must have been New York, of Derek’s too-young face, beardless and guarded. “I think I may have just time traveled.”

“You _what?_ ” Scott asked, sounding astonished.

Deaton looked completely unsurprised by that, although it was hard to tell whether that was just his usual unflappability or something else. “Interesting. Where— or should I say, _when_ — to?”

“New York, I think. 2008.” Stiles rubbed his hands over his arms, levering himself into a sitting position. Even with the desert sun beating down on him, he felt chilled to the bone. “November, which is really fucking cold in New York, for the record.”

“Hm,” Deaton said thoughtfully.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not sure. But we should get back to the clinic. I’ll need to check my records. And we ought to get a bandage on your hand.”

“Great,” Stiles muttered, rubbing at the cut on his palm. It was scabbed over, but it still hurt. “Does this mean it’s going to happen again?”

“I’m not sure,” Deaton said again, and offered him a hand up.

* * *

It totally happened again.

At least this time, he was lying on the couch in Deaton’s waiting room instead of flying down the highway at eighty miles an hour. He felt it first as a vague sort of tingling in his fingertips like the beginning of a panic attack, and then the world around him began to blur and fade.

He must have made some noise, because Scott suddenly bolted upright in his chair, hand outstretched. “Stiles? Stiles, are you—”

Then he faded, and the world around him faded, and Stiles landed on his back in the middle of a grassy meadow, huge trees looming above him and nearly blocking out the sky.

At least he was warm this time. And not currently in the path of any speeding vehicles, although, actually, that didn’t necessarily mean he was safe. There were no houses or people to be seen, nothing to guess where or when he’d landed this time. It could have been the Jurassic Period, for all he knew.

“If I get eaten by a dinosaur, I’m going to be so pissed,” Stiles said out loud, and sat up painfully. There were no dinosaurs in sight, so that was a plus, but there were also no signs of human habitation. Something small and furry skittered up the trunk of the nearest tree, rustling the leafy branches, and he could hear birds calling in the distance, but his immediate surroundings were quiet and still.

At first, he thought the whistling noise was just another bird, but it was low to the ground, melodic in a vaguely familiar way, and getting closer. Then a stick cracked, and a small, skinny boy slipped past the big tree on the far side of the clearing and stopped to stare at him.

He was— Stiles wasn’t that good at estimating kids’ ages, but he couldn’t have been more than eight or so. He was dressed in cargo shorts and a blue and brown striped t-shirt, his dark hair cropped to a short fuzz. Going by the clothes, it had to be sometime in the past, what, thirty years or so, not that that helped much. At least there weren’t any dinosaurs.

The kid didn’t look particularly surprised to see him there. He came a few steps closer, tilted his head, and peered at Stiles with an exasperated expression that was eerily familiar, although he couldn’t place where he’d seen it before. “You’re lost, aren’t you?”

“You have no idea,” Stiles said fervently. “Uh, where are we?”

“The woods,” the boy said, like he was an idiot. “Come on.”

He turned to leave without even looking to see if Stiles was obeying, and Stiles scrambled to his feet to follow him, awkward and ungainly in the thick underbrush that the kid slipped effortlessly through. “Where are we going?”

“My house,” the boy said. “You can use the phone there.”

“Your… I’m sorry, your _house_? You have a phone?”

The boy glanced over his shoulder with a look of such deep scorn that Stiles put his hands up. Because yeah, okay, that had been a pretty stupid question. Something about the kid— something about his easy comfort with the wild landscape, a strange familiar/not-familiar _oddness_ about him— made him seem like a forest spirit, like something that might have popped into existence between the roots of an old oak tree rather than, apparently, a perfectly normal third-grader.

“Okay, sorry, I’m a dumbass,” he said. “Thanks. Seriously.”

“People get lost out here all the time. It’s stupid to wander around in the woods if you don’t know where you’re going.”

Stiles barked out a surprised laugh. “They haven’t gotten around to teaching you tact at school yet, huh?”

The kid blinked up at him. “You just said you were a dumbass.”

“True.” Stiles ducked before a branch could smack him in the face. Were the trees getting thinner? God, he hoped so. There was a faint, niggling familiarity to the landscape now. He could have sworn he’d seen that weirdly shaped rock before, although whether it was pattern recognition or he’d actually been here before was anybody’s guess. “That doesn’t mean it’s polite to agree with me.”

“You sound like my mother.”

Oh, God, he did, didn’t he. He sounded exactly like someone’s mother. How had this become his…

Wait a second. Yeah, he _definitely_ knew that rock formation, he’d climbed that rock formation before, scrambled up it trying to escape a monster’s snapping teeth, and he knew that in about ten yards the trees would thin out into a clearing, a steeply sloping overgrown front yard—

“What,” he asked, his voice cracking and dry, his heart rate picking up suddenly. The kid glanced up at him, brow furrowed, and _oh, God_ , he knew that expression, just like he knew that instinctive reaction to a speeding heart rate and the odd, pale color of the kid’s eyes, how the hell had he not seen it before— “What did you say your mom’s name was?”

“I didn’t,” the kid said, flatly suspicious in a way that was both familiar and bizarrely, terrifyingly adorable on his small, round-cheeked face.

“Okay, how about your name?”

“I don’t think I should tell you that.”

“That’s probably smart,” Stiles said, and his voice still sounded weird, blank with shock. “I’m Stiles.”

The kid gave him another narrow-eyed look, then darted through the trees with sudden speed, leaving Stiles to stumble after him. It was only a few yards later that the trees began to clear, and yeah, he knew this place, that rotting tree stump, the slope of the wide front lawn. The huge old farmhouse, its wooden siding painted a faded and cheerful yellow, was different, though. The last time he’d seen it standing, it had been an overgrown, burnt-out husk.

A tall, dark-haired woman was coming down the front steps as they emerged from the woods. She looked at Stiles, then at the boy, and said, sounding amused, “Who’s your friend, Derek?”

“His name is Stiles,” the boy— _Derek_ — said, and slanted him another suspicious look. “He was lost. He was asking _questions_.”

“Really,” said the woman, surveying Stiles with a piercing gaze that was unnervingly familiar. It was only now that he saw the original version of it that he realized exactly who Derek had been trying to imitate during his brief and disastrous stint as an alpha.

Talia Hale exuded a calm, effortless authority, the absolute confidence of a woman who expected to be obeyed as a manner of course. Stiles tilted his head, baring his throat without even thinking about it, and saw her brows arch in surprise.

Right. That was something a wolf would do. Stiles wasn’t a werewolf, but he’d clearly spent too much of his time around the furry little bastards, and it was messing with his instinctive reactions. He cleared his throat, looked her in the eye, and said, “I was actually just hoping I could use your phone, if that’s okay.”

Although who the hell he was going to call was another question entirely. Deaton, maybe. Hopefully, the pattern would hold true and he’d pop back to the future before things got really awkward.

“Of course,” she said. She looped an arm around Derek’s shoulders and ruffled his hair, and Stiles found himself watching in something like astonishment as Derek leaned into the embrace with a half-hearted noise of protest, his round little face scrunched up as she dropped a kiss on the top of his head. “Derek, go wash up. Your hands are grimy.”

“But _Mom_ —”

“And watch the attitude.” She gave him a gentle shove toward the house and he went, grumbling all the way up the steps. Stiles watched him go, a weird tightness in the back of his throat. It didn’t get better when Talia turned to look at him, an expression of fond, maternal exasperation on her face, and said, “We’re just about to sit down to dinner. There’s plenty, if you’d like to join us.”

Stiles was pretty sure that was the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, so he wasn’t quite sure how, when he opened his mouth to politely refuse, what came out instead was, “That would be awesome, thank you so much.”

* * *

It was awful.

It was awful mostly because of how very not-awful it all was. There was no formal introduction, just the kind of cheerful shouted greetings that Stiles was more used to at college parties; apparently, random strangers turning up for dinner was neither unusual nor unexpected, which was not at all how he would have expected a werewolf household to conduct itself. The crockery was mismatched, the food delicious, the people friendly and rowdy in a way that he kept trying to square with the handful of wary, guarded survivors he knew in his own time, and failing.

The dark-haired toddler gleefully smearing tomato sauce across her face must have been Cora. Derek was engaged in a debate about Power Rangers with a skinny preteen girl who had to be Laura, arguing vociferously in favor of Jason Scott over Rocky DeSantos, and Stiles found himself shoving his chair back from the table and stumbling out of the room, out onto the broad front porch, unable to even care that nearly every head had popped up to stare at him.

It should have been funny. Eight-year-old Derek had very serious opinions about Power Rangers; it should have been fucking _hilarious_ , the kind of thing that he’d hold over Derek’s head forever, but it wasn’t.

Derek had been a kid with a family. He’d always known that on a theoretical level; Derek was _the way he was_ because of what had happened to them, but.

Derek had a sister who teased him about having a crush on Red Ranger and a mother who ruffled his hair and made him wash up before dinner, he was a smart-mouthed kid with a home and a family and he was going to lose this, he was going to lose all of this, all these people were going to die and it wasn’t fucking _fair._

“Stiles?” He turned to see Talia leaning out the front door, outlined in the golden light from inside. “Are you okay?”

Stiles opened his mouth, then shut it again. “Yeah. Sorry. Just needed some air.”

“Are you sure?”

He blinked, and for a moment he thought that it was tears blurring his vision, to go with the lump in the back of his throat. Then he realized that everything was blurring, fading, turning translucent. “I’m fine,” he choked, and ran.

He thought he heard her call after him, but he didn’t turn back. He just kept moving, sprinting toward the forest line as everything around him became indistinct, until he shoved through a tangle of underbrush and stumbled into the air-conditioned coolness of Deaton’s waiting room.

“Woah, Stiles! You okay?”

“What?” He looked down at his arms, which were, okay, yeah, kind of shredded from the bramble. “Yeah, I’m fine. What year is it?”

“2016,” Scott said. “You don’t look fine. Deaton!”

“Is he back?” Deaton asked, ducking out of his office. “Ah. Hello again, Stiles. I see we’ll need some more bandages.”

Malia peered over his shoulder. “Yeah, wow, he’s a mess. Were you crying?”

“No,” Stiles said flatly, swiping a hand over his eyes. It came away damp. Great.

Deaton came back into the room with his first-aid kit. “Sit,” he said calmly, and Stiles sat. “What happened?”

“I ran into a pricker bush, what does it look like?”

“Where did you go this time?”

“Don’t you mean _when?_ ” He was trying to make it come out snide, but it didn’t. “I don’t know. 1996? Ninety-seven?” He rubbed his free hand over his eyes again, wincing as Deaton dabbed antiseptic over the scratches. “I met Talia Hale.”

Deaton’s hand stilled briefly, but his voice was unreadable when he spoke. “Ah.”

“Wait, you mean Derek’s mom? My aunt?” Malia asked, drifting closer. “ _That_ Talia Hale?”

“Yeah,” Stiles said, and looked down at the floor between his knees. “She was really nice.”

“She was,” Deaton agreed quietly. His hands were gentle and firm, and Stiles couldn’t see his expression, but he could guess a little bit of it. Deaton had been her emissary, after all. They must have been close. It wasn’t the kind of thing Deaton ever really talked about, and he wasn’t the kind of person you could just _ask._

“This sucks,” Stiles said. “I hate this. I’m sick of it, can we find a way to fix it already?”

“What do you think we’ve been doing, dude?” Scott asked. “I called Lydia, and she’s looking into it at the Oxford libraries, which, look, if anywhere has the information we’re after, it’s probably there, but—”

“But no luck,” Stiles finished, and sighed.

“Not yet.”

“It’s because of that fucking temple, right? I knew it was a bad idea—”

“Hey,” Scott interrupted gently, like he hadn’t been the one trying to talk Stiles out of it at the time. “If you hadn’t done it, we’d probably both be dead. We’ll figure this out.”

“And until then, it’s going to keep happening, right?”

“It’s hard to be sure,” Deaton said, taping down the edge of the bandage. “Other arm, please. But yes, that seems likely. At least for a while. Sometimes spells like this just need to work themselves out. It may stop when whatever is powering it runs out of energy.”

“Great.” Stiles put his head back against the couch cushions and stared up at the water-stained ceiling. “And how likely is it that I just end up stuck somewhere in the past when and if that happens?”

Nobody had an answer for that.

* * *

He went home eventually, because his other option was sleeping on the uncomfortable couch at Deaton’s office, and it wasn’t like any of them had figured out a way to stop it from happening.

It would have been easier if his dad had been working, but of course he was home, settled in his armchair with a glass of whiskey and a game on TV. He gave Stiles a long look when he came in the door, gaze lingering on his bandaged arms. “Do I want to know?”

“Probably not,” Stiles sighed, dumping his backpack onto the couch. “But in the interest of full disclosure, I feel like I should inform you that I may vanish unexpectedly into thin air, and it’s probably fine, don’t worry about it, I’ll reappear eventually.”

His dad looked at him for a long moment, then set the whiskey down and turned the TV off. “I hope that’s not your idea of an explanation.”

“I was maybe hoping you’d just go with it?”

“You know better than that. Start talking.”

“Okay, okay.” Stiles scrubbed a hand through his hair, wincing at the pull of tape on his arm. “I’m… kind of experiencing random temporal displacement? We’re working on it.”

“Temporal displacement,” his dad said flatly. “You mean you’re time travelling.”

“It sounds way cooler than it actually is when you put it like that,” Stiles said. “I can’t control it, it sucks, and we’re working on it. So don’t worry.”

“You said that already.” His dad pinched the bridge of his nose. “Stiles, we talked about this.”

“What?”

“I told you. I draw the line at time travel.”

“It’s not my fault!” Stiles exclaimed, throwing up his arms. His dad gave him a look. “Okay, it’s not entirely my fault. I didn’t know this would happen.”

“But you did cause it.”

“Indirectly and unintentionally and in the course of rescuing both Scott and myself from being eaten by what I’m pretty sure was a pack of chupacabras— yeah okay, fine, I caused it, are you happy now?”

“No!”

“Me neither!”

They glared at each other for several moments, and then his dad sighed, slumping into his chair. “Okay. So how do we handle this?”

“We don’t handle this,” Stiles said, suddenly exhausted. “Not tonight. Deaton and Lydia are looking into it. There’s a temple that might have— anyway, for now, I’m going to bed and hoping like hell that I can _stay_ there for at least eight hours before being involuntarily teleported to destinations unknown. It’s been a really long day.”

“I don’t know how you always end up in these situations.” His dad shook his head, levered himself out of his chair, and crossed the room to pull him into a one-armed hug. “Try to stay safe, though, will you please?”

Stiles sighed, slumping against him, breathing in the familiar smell of cheap detergent and whiskey and the cigarette he must have snuck at the station. Thought, with a sudden unexpected pang, of Talia Hale ruffling her son’s hair in the front yard of a big yellow house, four hours and twenty years ago. “Yeah, okay. Night, Dad.”

“Good night, Stiles.”

* * *

He woke with a jolt to darkness, a surge of adrenaline jittering through him like he’d been falling. When he blinked the sleep from his eyes, though, he was flat on his back on his own mattress, the sheets tangled around his legs and his own familiar ceiling above him.

Just a bad dream, then.

There was a shift of sound, a booted footstep on the floor, and the low rasp of a voice. “Stiles.”

He flailed, almost rolled off the bed, then scrambled upright to see a dark shape looming in the corner of the room. “Oh, holy— _Derek?_ ”

Derek stepped closer, moving into the thin light coming in through the blinds so that Stiles could see his scowling face. It was… weird, seeing him like this with the fresh memory of that very same scowl on his little elementary-school-aged self. “You’re supposed to be at Scott’s.”

“What? Why? Did Deaton tell you that? I told him I was just going home. Also, you’re supposed to be in Mexico, what the hell are you doing here?” Stiles took a breath, rubbed his knuckles over his chest like he could soothe his pounding heart like that. “Did Scott call you?”

“No,” Derek said, furrowing his brow like it was the stupidest question he’d ever heard.

“Then what are you doing here?”

Derek gritted his teeth, then said, clearly reluctant, “I need your help.”

“Okay,” Stiles said slowly. “With what? And why did you come here if you thought I was at Scott’s?”

“I was going to use your computer,” Derek said, like that was a reasonable explanation for appearing in someone’s bedroom in the middle of the night like some kind of grumpy leather-clad ninja. “But since you’re here, you can help me. Get up.”

“We really need to work on your people skills, have I told you that recently?” Stiles swung his legs off the bed, obscurely grateful that he’d actually bothered to put pajama pants on instead of just crashing in his boxers. Random unexpected nudity was an occupational hazard of hanging around werewolves as much as he did, but Stiles preferred to retain an element of mystery when it came to his own naked body. Especially around Derek, for reasons that he was mostly unwilling to examine in any detail.

“I have more important things to worry about right now,” Derek said, and thrust a dog-eared book at him. “I need a translation of this.”

“And you came to _me_ because…?”

“Are you going to help, or not?”

“Yeah, of course I’m going to help,” Stiles said, pulling his laptop open and typing in the password. “You don’t have to be a dick about it, I’m just… huh.”

 _Password Incorrect_. He checked the caps lock key and typed it again, then frowned when he got the same error message.

Derek loomed over his shoulder, warm and close, filling Stiles’s nose up with the sudden overwhelming smell of leather and something wild and green, like he’d been rolling around in a meadow before climbing through the window. Which, knowing Derek, was totally possible. His breath moved the small hairs on the back of Stiles’s neck when he spoke. “What is it?”

“Personal space, dude,” Stiles said, and put a hand back without looking, shoving at Derek’s solid chest. There was a moment of resistance, and then Derek made an annoyed sound and backed off. “Give me a second, I think—”

The second password he tried didn’t work either. He ran his fingers along the edge of his desk, considering, then tried another, older one with no expectation that it would actually work, pleasantly surprised when the screen lit up. “Gotcha. Sorry, I think my dad’s been messing with my laptop again, he thinks he has computer skills, but— okay, what are we looking for?”

“Translation,” Derek said, slapping the book down on the desk and leaning over him again to jab at a paragraph. “And any other information you can pull up on druidic magic. Specifically wolfsbane-based spells.”

“Right, right, okay,” Stiles mumbled, pulling up Google Translate. Better than nothing, but at some point one of them was going to have to sit down and actually learn Latin, especially with Lydia on the other side of the globe until next year. “It probably would have been faster to ask Deaton, you realize.”

Derek grunted dismissively, peering over his shoulder at the screen. “Is that it?”

“Yeah. I mean, roughly,” Stiles said. “It’s Google Translate, it’s not an exact science. I hope you’re not actually going to try to use the ritual based on this, because I’m so not up for dealing with it if you start sprouting extra limbs or something on top of everything else. Which, hey, speaking of, I should probably tell you—”

“Good enough. You can get back to me on the rest of it,” Derek interrupted, snatching up the book again and backing toward the open window. Stiles spun in his chair to face him, frowning, as he paused on the windowsill. “You should put down mountain ash. Deucalion and his pack are still around, and you’re vulnerable.”

“What?” Stiles said blankly, but Derek was already slipping through the window, pulling it shut behind him and dropping lightly onto the roof below. By the time Stiles had made it across the room and hauled the window open again, he had vanished into the darkness like he’d never been there at all. Stiles gripped the frame, peering out at the empty street, and said, “Wait, seriously, _what?_ ”

Deucalion was dead. Deucalion had _been_ dead for more than a year, and hadn’t had a pack for a lot longer than that. Which meant— _shit_.

He dropped into his chair again and peered at the bottom right corner of his laptop. Sure enough, there it was: _5/3/2013_.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he said out loud. Because of course he was time-traveling in his sleep now. Of fucking course he was. He was time traveling, in his sleep, into _his own damn bedroom_.

He squeezed his eyes shut, pressed his thumbs into the bridge of his nose and leaned back in his chair. It was probably just dumb luck that so far he hadn’t managed to run into his past self and create some kind of temporal paradox.

Although: if he had, he’d remember it, right? Derek had never mentioned meeting future-Stiles, but on the other hand, none of their encounters so far had been that memorable. A chance run-in on the sidewalk, a walk through the woods when Derek was still in elementary school. How much did most people really remember about being that age, anyway? And tonight— Derek hadn’t even realized that Stiles wasn’t the Stiles he knew. It wasn’t like he’d aged noticeably in the past three years. Neither of them had.

So he was safe. He was _probably_ safe. If he was going to accidentally delete himself from history, it would already have happened. He was still here, ergo he hadn’t done it.

And thinking about this much longer was going to give him a headache, so he should probably stop. Lydia probably would have loved it, closet physics nerd that she was. God, he missed her. Scott was getting to be a competent alpha these days, but it was nice having somebody else around to share the burden of being the resident genius, and Lydia had always been better at that than him.

His fingertips were beginning to tingle. He opened his eyes in time to see his dark room slide away into nothingness, and then he was falling backward, landing hard on the carpeted floor. His desk was turned slightly askew, the chair on the far side of the room with a GWU hoodie flung over the back of it.

Back to the present, then.

There were soft footsteps in the hallway outside, a pause, and then a rap at his door. “Stiles? You okay in there?”

“Yeah, Dad, I’m great,” Stiles said, and let his head fall back with a thump.


	2. You Look a Lot Like Forever

 

The next morning saw Scott, Deaton, and Mason crowded around the kitchen table. His dad gave them all a long, suspicious look, but finally acquiesced when Stiles waved him off, heading in to the station with a travel mug of coffee the size of his head and orders to call him if anything— “Anything _at all,_ Stiles,” —went wrong.

“Sure, Dad,” Stiles told him cheerfully, and waited until he heard the car back out of the driveway to drop his head onto the table. “Please tell me you guys have something.”

“I think we need to go back out to the temple,” Scott said, and no, that was the opposite of encouraging.

“That is the opposite of encouraging,” Stiles told him. “Do you remember how this all started in the first place?”

“I know,” Scott said apologetically, “but—”

“There may be clues there that we missed the first time,” Deaton interjected smoothly. “Since we didn’t know we needed to be looking.”

Stiles groaned without lifting his head. “What did Lydia say? Did you hear back from her yet?”

Deaton and Scott exchanged a glance, and then Deaton said, “She called last night, yes. She said she tried calling you first.”

“Ugh.” Stiles lifted his head to peer at his phone, pulling up his call log, and yeah, sure enough, there was a missed call from Lydia. 3:46 AM. Trust her to pick the one time that he wasn’t present on this plane of physical reality to call. “Yeah. I was otherwise occupied.”

“Doing _what?_ ” Scott asked incredulously.

“Translating druidic spells for Derek back in 2013. Apparently I’m time-traveling in my sleep now, it’s great. Come on, spill. Did she find anything?”

“Maybe,” Mason said, reaching for his bag. He set it down on the table and began unloading a stack of textbooks. “Are you familiar with the goddess Ananke?”

“What? Who?”

“Greek. Personification of inevitability, compulsion, and necessity. Mother of the fates, consort of Chronos. Uh…” he grabbed a book off the top of the pile and flipped through until he came to a picture. “Here. She’s usually depicted with a spindle. Sound familiar?”

“No,” Stiles said, peering at the picture. It was a line drawing of a woman on a throne, spindle in hand, draped in some kind of robe that left one breast bare. Her imperious gaze, even on paper, seemed to pierce right through him. “So you’re saying I pissed off a Greek goddess. That’s awesome. What the hell is a Greek temple even doing in California, anyway?”

“How are there druids in California?” Deaton said. “These traditions are not static. They’re not necessarily tied to any single place. They change. They _evolve_ , just as we do.” He paused, then added, “Although in this particular case it seems likely that whoever consecrated the temple used an existing structure as an energy sink. It wouldn’t have been an issue if you hadn’t disturbed it.”

“Great,” Stiles said. “So let’s go disturb it again, there’s no way that could possibly go wrong.”

“I’m not even sure that she’s _pissed_ at you, per se,” Mason said. His finger was running down a paragraph of text. “Look, I mean, you disturbed her temple, definitely, but—”

“So did Scott,” Stiles said. “And he’s not involuntarily time-traveling.”

“Right, but your blood was on the door. Also, Scott’s a werewolf, which might make him immune. And…” Mason trailed off, exchanged a glance with Deaton, and then abruptly shut his mouth.

“What?” Stiles said. “Okay, seriously, what’s with the look? I hate that look, you know I hate it.”

“It’s possible,” Deaton said carefully, “that she views this as a lesson. Are there any common elements to these… I guess we can call them ‘jumps’?”

“Any common elements?” Stiles asked blankly.

“Do you keep returning to a particular time, or place, or—”

“Person?” Stiles finished. All three of them were looking at him with expressions so knowing that he dropped his face into the cradle of his arms just so he didn’t have to look at them. _One’s an incident, two is coincidence, three’s a pattern._ It wasn’t like he hadn’t been thinking it too. “God, fuck you, just say it.”

“It’s Derek, isn’t it?” Scott said, and his voice was terribly gentle.

“Do I have to answer that?” Stiles said into the darkness between his elbow and the table. Silence. “Yeah, fine, okay, it’s Derek. So?”

“Should we call him, do you think?” Scott asked.

“Dude, I don’t even know if he has a phone,” Stiles said, which was a bullshit lie, because he’d been the one to drag Derek out to buy a phone and force him to set it up and threaten him with terrible violence if he didn’t keep it handy while he was out of the country. Not that threatening Derek with terrible violence ever actually _worked_ , but it seemed to entertain him. And he tended to go along with most of Stiles’s ideas regardless, which was something that Stiles had been determinedly not reading into for years now. “What am I supposed to tell him, anyway?”

“The truth?”

“That sounds like the kind of terrible idea only you could come up with,” Stiles said snidely, and finally lifted his head. Scott didn’t even look annoyed; his expression was entirely sympathetic. That was so much worse. Seriously, he should weaponize those puppy-dog eyes. Stiles groaned. “Fine.”

“You should tell him to come back here, if he can,” Deaton said. “It’s possible that having you both in the same place in the present will disrupt whatever is happening here.”

“Possible,” Stiles said. “You mean you don’t know.”

“It’s worth a try,” Scott said. “We can keep looking into it, but if Derek is the common element…”

“Yeah, yeah, okay, fine,” Stiles sighed, pulling his phone out of his pocket.

“We can give you some privacy if you want.”

“We’re not having phone sex,” Stiles said, taking a mean satisfaction in the three identical looks of discomfort as he thumbed the speed-dial for Derek’s number, listening to the ringing on the other end of the line. “I’m just going to— hey, Derek, you actually picked up, color me amazed.”

“Stiles?” Derek sounded surprised. No— he sounded _shocked_. Stiles frowned, opening his mouth, but before he could answer, Derek said quickly, “Where are you? Tell me where you are, and I’ll—”

“I’m at my dad’s house,” Stiles said slowly. “I’m… look, it’s a long story, a _really_ long story, but have you run into, uh, _me_ recently?”

There was a crackle of static, and then Derek said, sounding pretty seriously pissed, “If by recently you mean _an hour ago—_ ”

“I’m gonna take that as a yes.” He was going to take that as _fucking worrying_ , actually, because Derek sounded like he was skirting the edge of panic, and there wasn’t much that got to him like that. Hardly anything got to him like that. “So, hey, guess what: I’m time-traveling.”

“What?”

“Time-traveling,” Stiles repeated. “Involuntarily, and at random, it’s great. So whichever _me_ you just saw is probably long-gone into the future— ugh, this is confusing. Look, where are you? Can you get back to Beacon Hills today?”

There was a brief pause, and then, “Yes,” Derek said shortly. “I’ll be there in four hours.”

Stiles blinked. “That was easy. I was figuring I’d have to at least sit through the ‘important werewolf business, I have better things to do than pull you out of your own messes, Stiles’ lecture first. Not that you _do_ , but—”

“Stiles,” Derek interrupted. “I’m…” The line crackled, breaking up for second before Derek’s voice continued, “... my way. But… have to figure out… to stop… okay?”

“Yeah, dude, we’re trying, but—”

There was a hiss of static, and the line went dead. Stiles pulled the phone away from his ear again and hit redial. It went straight to voicemail. He hung up and tried again. And again. Nothing.

Finally, he let the recorded message run all the way through, and at the beep said, “Okay, look, just call me back when you have service, would you? Because you kinda freaked me out just now, and trust me, I’m plenty freaked out already. So just. Call me. Okay?”

He hung up, dropped his phone onto the table, and looked up to see the other three watching him. “He’s on his way.”

“Everything okay?” Scott asked slowly.

“Peachy,” Stiles said, pressing his knuckles into the burgeoning headache building between his eyes. “He ran into an alternate version of me and apparently it freaked him out, and you know what, I really miss the days when homicidal werewolves were the weirdest and most unpleasant thing that ever happened to me.”

“Tell me about it,” Scott sighed. “You still want to go check out the temple?”

“ _Want_ is a pretty strong word. But yeah, we probably should. Derek won’t be here for a few hours anyway; we have time. I’m not driving, though.”

“Yeah, it would suck if you vanished from behind the wheel and crashed us into a tree,” Mason said, stuffing his books into his bag. It took him a good thirty seconds of struggling to get the zipper closed. “I’ll drive, if you guys want.”

“Great,” Stiles said, meaning the exact opposite. “Awesome. Let’s go.”

* * *

The temple looked a lot less ominous in daylight. The wall was still there, the smear of Stiles’s blood faded to a reddish-brown stain on the porous stone.

“Like I thought,” Deaton said, inspecting the carvings. “This wasn’t originally consecrated to Ananke. Her worshippers must have come later. I know there was a cult for a while at Stanford back in the 60’s, but I’m not sure where they would have found someone with the knowledge… hm.”

“What?” Stiles asked, rocking back and forth on his feet. Scott and Mason were walking the perimeter, looking for anything in the way of clues, but it didn’t look like they were finding anything but scrub grass and monster tracks. There was no sign of the chupacabras that Deaton and Malia had killed the other day. Hopefully, they’d been dragged off by the rest of the pack, or by coyotes. Hopefully, there wasn’t something even nastier lurking in these hills. “How long do you think this is going to take? I really don’t want to be here if those things decide to come back.”

“They won’t,” Deaton said confidently. “They’re nocturnal.”

“So are werewolves,” Stiles retorted. “Can we just hurry?”

“Yeah, there’s nothing here,” Scott said, jogging up to them, Mason lagging behind him. “Anything in the temple?”

“If we could get _in_ maybe there would be,” Stiles said. “Deaton?”

“Hm? Oh. I don’t think it’s a good idea for any of us to bleed on the door, given what happened last time, but perhaps Stiles could try?”

“Great, set me up as the sacrificial lamb, I see how it is,” Stiles muttered, but he was already rolling up his sleeve. “Anybody got a knife?”

“I don’t think you’ll need one.” Deaton nodded to the bloodstain. “You’ve already bled here. It should remember you.”

“That’s not ominous or anything,” Stiles muttered, setting his bandaged hand against the door. It was hot to the touch in a way that might have just been from the sun. “Okay, here goes noth—”

The stone melted away at his touch, and he tumbled into darkness.

“Stiles?” Scott called from above. Stiles lifted his head and saw, with some relief, that the door was still open; he could see a rectangle of light coming in, and Scott’s fluffy head silhouetted against it. How he was going to get back up there was another story, but at least he wasn’t locked in. For now.

“I’m okay,” he groaned, lifting a hand to wave. “Stay up there, I’m okay.”

Deaton’s head appeared next to Scott’s. “Do you see anything?”

“Not really, it’s dark as hell down here. Should have brought a flashlight.” Something hit the floor next to him with a clatter. He leaned down and groped around in the darkness for a moment before coming up with a Maglite.

“I always carry one,” Mason called, as Stiles flicked it on. “Do you need anything else?”

“Got any snacks? I’m joking,” Stiles added, as Mason turned to rummage through his bag. “I’m just going to… huh.”

“What?” Scott asked.

“Hang on a second.” The room seemed bigger than he remembered; he and Scott hadn’t really explored it much the other night, but it was several times the size of the building overhead, a vast echoing space with the corners swathed in darkness. He was pretty sure it had been empty last time, though, and it wasn’t now. There was something there, in the far corner. A structure, or an altar, or something like that; as he drifted closer he could see the bass-relief sculpture of a woman looming over it, her eyes closed, her body draped in a chiton, one pale marble hand emerging from the wall to spread over the table beneath.

Stiles leaned forward to blow dust off of the surface of it, but the writing beneath was all Greek; he could recognize a word here or there, but not enough to make any kind of sense of it.

They _had_ to get someone other than Lydia who could read ancient languages. This was becoming an issue.

Still, he took his phone out to photograph the script, holding it up high enough to get the whole table, and then taking a few close-up shots just to be sure.

When he looked up again, the statue’s eyes were open. They were milky and pale, pupil-less, gleaming like pearls in the darkness. Stiles jerked back, tripped over his own feet, and went down hard on his ass.

“Holy _shit._ ”

“Stiles?” That was Scott, but his voice sounded distant and strange, like it was coming through water, like he was a lot farther away than the other end of the temple. “Are you okay?”

Stiles opened his mouth to answer, but all that came out was a dry little rasp. The statue was _moving_ , detaching itself from the stone wall and stepping delicately over the altar, hands lifting the carved stone drape of its chiton out of the way as it hopped down. It landed with a dull _thud_ that shook the floor, and Stiles scrambled backward, the flashlight falling from his hand to roll away across the stone. “Oh shit oh shit oh _shit—”_

Cool hands on his face. It wasn’t like being touched by a person, or by anything living at all; the hands were still obviously made out of stone, polished smooth with no give to them at all. There was a terrible sense of _life_ to them, though, and Stiles let out a squeak, trying hard not to consider how easily those marble fingers could crush his skull into powder. The carved face of the goddess leaned into his field of view, blank and serene, eyes like pale moons.

“Okay,” Stiles said breathlessly, “look, I’m sorry I disturbed your temple, like, _really_ sorry, if you let me go I’ll leave and never come back, I promise, I—”

One cool marble finger pressed to his lips, and the rest of the words choked off in his throat. The goddess was peering at him. Her face was still blank, but there was a vaguely frustrated tilt to her head that Stiles had seen on too many people to count. It just figured that his knack for getting on people’s nerves would extend to an actual _goddess_. Or, like, an avatar of one, anyway. He didn’t exactly know how it worked, it’s not like they taught this in school. Although they should have, like night classes on the supernatural or something, or— shit, oh _shit._

The goddess leaned closer, and her hands were back on his cheeks, holding his head still even as he tried to pull away.

“Hey, look, I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, but I’m not that kind of g— _ack!_ ”

The cool press of stone against his lips didn’t exactly feel invasive, not the way he imagined it would if he was being nonconsensually kissed by another person, but it was very definitely fucking _weird._ He was still more than a little concerned that she was going to try to crush his skull, but he couldn’t help pulling back, turning his head slightly to break contact.

He squinted one eye open. The goddess was still staring at him with pale, blank eyes. It was even more unnerving from a couple of inches away, and yeah, there was no way he was actually going anywhere unless and until she let go of him, so he squeezed his eyes shut again.

There was a soft sigh, and then fingers flexed against his cheeks. They weren’t cold anymore; instead of the inhuman smoothness of polished stone, they were warm and rough and alive. A warm puff of breath on his skin, and he opened his eyes.

If he hadn’t already been on his ass, he would have fallen over. The marble goddess was gone. In her place, Derek Hale was leaning over him, so close that Stiles could pick out the scattered prickles of silver in his beard and the odd variants of color of his light green eyes even in the dim light.

“Uh,” Stiles said blankly. “Derek?”

Derek’s eyes flicked down to his lips, and Stiles felt like his brain was about three steps behind, so he was a hell of a lot more shocked than he probably should have been when Derek leaned forward and kissed his mouth.

It was— okay, something Stiles had maybe imagined more times than he really wanted to admit. The reality of it was even better. Yeah, so the circumstances were weird, but honestly, given their lives, not _that_ weird. He found himself tilting into the kiss, lifting his chin, letting Derek’s fingers trail down the side of his jaw—

And then, just as suddenly, it was over. Derek’s hands were gone from his face. When he opened his eyes, he was alone. No Derek, no marble goddess, no altar; just an empty, dusty underground room with the flashlight spilling bright white light across the rough floor.

There was a heavy _thud_ from the far side of the room, a pained grunt, and then rapid footsteps on the stone floor. Scott’s hands hooking under his shoulders, pulling him effortlessly up. “Stiles? Stiles, are you okay? You weren’t answering, we thought—”

“I’m fine,” Stiles said, pushing back enough that he could stand on his own. He felt lightheaded, faintly dizzy, but he wasn’t going to fall over. Probably. His mouth was still warm and tingling from the memory (hallucination?) of Derek’s lips on his.

“What happened?”

Stiles rubbed a hand over his mouth, glanced back behind him at the blank wall where the altar had stood. “I have no idea. But I think we should get the hell out of here.”

* * *

“Did you find anything?” Deaton asked, once they were back on the road.

“There was an altar there. Or a… something, anyway. A table with symbols on it. Writing.”

“An altar,” Deaton confirmed.

“I didn’t see anything like that,” Scott interjected from the front seat. “Was it—”

“It disappeared before you showed up.” Stiles rubbed a hand over his mouth again, then dropped it when he saw Deaton watching him with a thoughtful furrow between his brows. “I took pictures, though.”

“May I see?” Deaton held out a hand, and after a minute hesitation, Stiles dropped his phone into it.

“I didn’t know you read Greek.”

“I don’t,” Deaton said absently, thumbing through the photos. Stiles peered over his shoulder, relieved to see that they had actually come out. He’d been half-expecting them to vanish like the altar and the statue had. “But this still may be useful.”

“There was something else,” Stiles said reluctantly, because yeah, it was probably important information. “A statue of Akan—”

“Ananke,” Mason interjected from the driver’s seat.

“Yeah, her. It, the statue, it kind of… came to life.”

“Interesting,” Deaton said thoughtfully. “Did it attack you? Or did it speak?”

“Not… exactly.” Stiles licked his lips. “It kind of… it was weird. I think it may have been trying to tell me something via induced hallucination. Or possibly just crush my skull, I don’t know. She— it— wasn’t exactly talkative.”

“You had a vision.”

“Sure. A very, uh. Vivid one.”

“Of what?” Scott asked, twisting around in the front seat to look at him. “Stiles? What did you see? It could be important.”

“If it was a vision from Ananke, then the Greek personification of fate is way more invested in my personal life than I’m comfortable with,” Stiles said irritably.

“Oh,” Scott said, like he’d gotten everything he needed just from that. Which, yeah, he probably had. Scott wasn’t always that quick on the uptake, but he could be uncomfortably perceptive at the worst moments. “Huh.”

“Can we please just not?” Stiles asked, feeling slightly desperate. “Look, any minute now I’m going to vanish into thin air, we still have no idea how to prevent that from happening, there are more important issues right now than whether or not I want to—” He cut himself off before that sentence could get any more incriminating than it already was.

There was a long silence, and then Scott said quietly, “Derek will probably be at the house by the time we get back there. Maybe you should try talking to him.”

“What the hell is that going to solve? I talk to him all the time.”

“You know what I mean, Stiles.” Scott sounded uncharacteristically impatient. “I’m not going to sit around and wait for you to get hurt or worse just because you’re too stubborn to—”

“I’m not _stubborn_ , I’m—”

“This is not helping,” Deaton interrupted, with an edge to his quiet voice.

A silence, and then Scott muttered, “Sorry.”

“He’s right, though,” Deaton said, turning his calm gaze on Stiles. “If the vision showed you something involving Derek, it would be wise to pay attention. It’s clear that whatever the nature of it, a connection between you two exists and should be acknowledged.”

Stiles squinted at him. “Is this your subtle way of telling me that I need to get in Derek’s pants?”

In the front seat, Mason made a choking noise. Deaton sighed. “This is my way of telling you that whatever unresolved business there is between you, you should consider resolving it. I neither need nor want the specifics.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” Stiles said, and put his head back against the seat cushion.

* * *

He must have dozed off somewhere outside of Hill Valley, because he closed his eyes for literally just a few seconds, and the next thing he was aware of was landing hard on a carpeted floor.

“Oh, fuck my life,” he said out loud, with feeling, and lifted his head to look around. The darkened room was unfamiliar, bland and sparsely decorated in a way that screamed _cheap motel,_ especially given the overwhelming smell of burnt coffee, mildew, and bleach. The shades were open enough to let in the orangey glow of a street light outside and an uninspiring view of cracked pavement. The lot seemed almost empty, but the black gleam of a car hood was just visible through the corner of the window.

A Camaro, probably. Given the odds. He was pretty sure he knew exactly whose shitty motel room he’d just crashed into the middle of.

Sure enough, there was a rustle from the bed, the sleeping lump of a body shifting, then sitting suddenly bolt upright with an unfriendly-sounding snarl, the sharply sibilant sound of claws unsheathing. He turned in time to see the electric gleam of blue eyes in the darkness, and then Derek said blankly, “ _Stiles?_ What the hell are you doing here?”

“Hey, Derek,” he said, giving an awkward little wave and pushing himself upright. “That’s actually a really long story, which I will explain, but I need to ask you a stupid question first.”

“What are you talking about?” Derek said warily. There was the slight thickness to his voice that meant he was still talking around fangs, but at least he wasn’t diving off the bed to rip Stiles’s throat out. Small blessings.

“Weird question, like I said. What year is it?”

“What?”

“Just— can you please just answer me?”

“2015,” Derek said, reaching for the light switch. He shook off the wolf-face as warm yellow light spilled through the room, leaving him human and sleep-rumpled and… mostly naked. Yeah. Apparently Derek didn’t own pajama pants, and the boxer briefs he was wearing left next to nothing to the imagination. Stiles determinedly fixed his gaze on Derek’s perplexed and scowly face. “Start explaining. Now.”

Stiles opened his mouth, considered his abysmal track record of successfully lying to Derek’s face, and then said, finally, “So, I’ve been time-traveling.”

“You _what?_ ”

“Time-traveling. Me. Which, this is really weird, I’ve already had this conversation with you once today, but since that happened— will happen?— in 2016, I guess you don’t—”

“Stiles,” Derek interrupted, and Stiles snapped his mouth shut as Derek swung his legs off of the bed and crossed the room toward him, and oh, yeah, that was definitely a whole lot of Derek on display, strong chest and solid thighs and the oddly fragile curve of his ankles, and it would have been distracting as hell even if he didn’t have his recent hallucination of Derek kissing him fresh in his mind. “Calm down.”

“What? I’m calm. I’m totally calm.”

“I can hear your heartbeat,” Derek said, with a quirk of his brows that almost looked amused. “I know you’re lying.”

“Okay, no, you’re right, I’m freaking out. Just probably not for the reasons you think.”

“You just popped out of thin air into my motel room.”

“Yeah, but that’s been happening a lot lately.” Stiles said. “I’m kind of over it.”

“Really.”

“For the past couple of days, yeah.” He levered himself up with a groan, and to his surprise, Derek reached down to give him a hand up. His palm was warm and calloused, just like— Stiles pulled back before he could complete that thought and leaned as casually as he could against the desk. “I accidentally trespassed on a temple of the goddess of time and fate, and she’s been trying to teach me a lesson.”

Derek made a noise that on anyone else would be a snort of laughter. “What lesson?”

“Unclear,” Stiles said, and watched Derek’s eyes narrow at the sharp thump of his heart.

“ _Really_ ,” Derek said again, this time with an extra layer of skepticism.

“Can I get a gimme just this once?” Stiles asked, without much hope. Derek just looked at him. “Okay, then can you put some pants on? I refuse to have this conversation while you’re in your underwear.”

Derek looked down at himself like he’d just now noticed that it was just a thin scrap of _very close-fitting_ black cotton preventing Stiles from getting an up close and personal view of his dick. When he looked back up, one eyebrow was lifted in what was definitely amusement.

Sometimes Stiles really missed the days when Derek was too busy wallowing in his guilt and emotional torment to display anything like a sense of humor.

Only, no, he admitted, thinking back to the angry, wounded ball of misery he’d bumped into on a New York City sidewalk yesterday. Not really. Not even when it was at his expense. God damn it.

“Fine,” Derek said eventually, and yeah, he was absolutely laughing at Stiles. His eyebrows were distinctly amused. He crossed over to the other side of the room, untangled a pair of black jeans from the pile on the floor— incidentally giving Stiles a fantastic view of his ass as he bent over— and tugged them on. “Happy now?”

Stiles licked dry lips. The belt was still unbuckled, and Derek hadn’t bothered to do up the top button of his fly. Along with his soft, sleep-mussed hair, the overall effect was actually even more debauched than the sight of him in his underwear. He tore his eyes away from the line of dark hair that led down from Derek’s navel into the waistband of his briefs. “Ecstatic.”

“Good. Start talking.”

“So,” Stiles said, clapping his hands together. “Time travel, yeah. Not as cool as generally advertised.”

“You can’t control it at all?” Derek asked.

“I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a punishment, not a gift,” Stiles sighed. “No, trust me, if I could control it I wouldn’t be here. Not that you aren’t my absolute favorite of all the supernatural fugitives from justice that I know, but I feel like it’s just a matter of time— literally— before I pop in on you doing something a lot more embarrassing than sleeping in your underwear. You might want to consider investing in a pair of sweatpants, by the way. I’m pretty sure you can afford it.”

“My assets were frozen when I went on the run,” Derek said, “and I wasn’t exactly expecting company.” Then his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “What do you mean, it’s just a matter of time before you pop in on me?”

“Um.” Stiles ran through what he’d just said in his head, and yeah, there was probably no way to make that sound less incriminating than it actually was. “Shit.”

Derek folded his arms across his chest. “Stiles.”

“Okay, look, this is totally not my fault, okay? As we just established, I can’t control where or when I end up.”

“ _Stiles._ ”

“She thinks I have some kind of connection to you, okay?” Stiles said in a rush. “Wherever I go, I always end up where you are.”

“This has happened before,” Derek said slowly.

“Yeah.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “First time was NYC. 2008. You pulled me out of the street before I could get run over by a cab. Then dragged me into an alley to threaten me, which, okay, totally in character, considering that you didn’t have any idea who I was at the time. Then there was the time you showed up in my room looking for research on druids— I didn’t even realize until you were already gone, that time. And—” He stopped, swallowed.

“And?” Derek asked, after the silence had stretched out for several agonizing seconds. His expression was impossible to read.

Stiles dropped his gaze to the worn carpet between his feet. “You found me in the woods out by the Preserve. You were— shit, I don’t know, seven or eight? You brought me back to your house, you— you probably don’t remember any of this, do you?”

“You stayed for dinner,” Derek said. His voice was quiet and strange. “And then you disappeared. We looked all over, but we couldn’t find you. Your scent just stopped at the edge of the property.” His eyes scanned Stiles’s face, like he was searching for something. It made Stiles feel jittery and weird in his own skin. More so than usual. He drummed his fingers on his thighs, then shoved his hands in his pockets, forcing them to still. “I remember. That was you?”

“Yep.”

“And in New York—”

“Also me.”

“I thought you were a hunter.”

“Yeah.” Stiles laughed, breathless and dry. The look on Derek’s face was— he didn’t know what to do with that, not at all. Maybe he should have tried harder to sell a lie. “I got that, trust me.”

“We moved after that. Me and Laura. I thought that the Argents had—”

Stiles winced. “In my defense, I didn’t actually know what the hell was going on that time. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Derek said absently. He was still looking at Stiles with that strangely focused expression. Stiles could feel a flush rising in his cheeks in response to the piercing intensity of his stare.

Definitely just that. Definitely not the fact that Derek was close enough to touch, shirtless and sleep-warm and focused entirely on him in the dim stillness of the motel room. Stiles took his hands out of his pockets, scrubbed them over the rough denim of his jeans again, then gripped the desk behind him, pressing his hot palms to the cool wooden surface before he could do something unforgivably stupid.

Like, say, reaching out, cupping Derek’s bearded cheeks between his hands, and—

—and he needed to put the brakes on that train of thought _right now_ , since he was standing three feet away from a living lie-detector who could smell arousal, and they were kind of past the point where he could write off awkward boners as the inevitable result of being a sexually frustrated sixteen-year-old constantly surrounded by hot people.

He coughed, flexing his fingers on the desk. “So, anyway. That’s what’s been going on.”

“You’ve been time-traveling into my past,” Derek said. His voice was unreadable.

“Yeah,” Stiles said, wishing he had room to take a step back. It wasn’t the first time Derek had ever backed him up against a piece of furniture, but usually the context was a lot different. If Derek would just threaten him with violence, that would be really reassuring, but he didn’t. “Sorry?”

“I said it was fine.” Derek looked down; it took Stiles a second to realize that he was looking at where his hands were clenched, white-knuckled, around the edge of the table. He relaxed them with a conscious effort. “Any idea why?”

“What?”

“Why me?” Derek repeated. There was a tilt to his jaw that was almost challenging. “Any idea?”

“Nope,” Stiles said. His heart thudded sharply in his chest. “No clue.”

“You’re lying,” Derek said, like he was remarking on the weather, and took a step closer.

Stiles swallowed, a dry click at the back of his throat. “I’m not lying.”

“Yeah, you are,” Derek said easily. He was so close now that Stiles could smell him, could feel the unnatural heat rising off of his skin. “Why?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Stiles breathed, and then Derek was leaning in, hands bracing on the table, bracketing him with his arms. His breath warm on Stiles’s lips, his gaze direct and challenging. Overwhelming, so close. “You know why. Come on, don’t do this.”

“Do what?” Derek asked, low. “This?”

He closed the last few inches between them, slow enough that Stiles could have turned his face aside if he’d wanted to. He didn’t. Their lips met, soft and dry and not at all as pushy as he would have imagined (as he _had_ imagined) Derek would be about this if he ever lost his mind enough to actually do it.

Derek pulled back just enough to murmur, “Is that why?”

“Yes,” Stiles rasped, and then his hands were lifting of their own volition, cupping Derek’s rough cheeks like he’d been thinking about doing since the first moment he appeared here, thumbs smoothing over his cheekbones. “ _Yes,_ that’s why, you already know that’s why, please tell me you’re not just messing with me, tell me this isn’t your idea of, of an interrogation, or—”

“I’m not,” Derek said, pulling back enough to look him in the eye. He actually looked kind of offended at the implication. “I wouldn’t.”

“Oh, good,” Stiles said, “just checking,” and then he dragged Derek down for another kiss.

There was nothing tentative about it this time. Derek’s mouth was hot and slick, his beard rough, and it was about twenty times hotter than the hallucinatory kiss back in the basement of the temple. The reality of it, the heat of Derek’s body against him, the flex of muscle in his arm as he let go of the table to slide his hand up into Stiles’s hair, tilting his head for a better angle. The move brought them flush against each other, and Stiles would have been embarrassed about grinding his hard-on into Derek’s hip if it weren’t for the fact that Derek was hard, too. He could feel the ridge of his cock pressed against his belly, shockingly hot even through a layer of denim.

“Holy shit,” he breathed, tearing his mouth away. “You’re actually, seriously into this.”

Derek gave him a look that was astonishingly judgmental considering that he was currently grinding his dick against Stiles, the slow roll of his hips too rhythmic to be anything but intentional. “Why the hell do you think I’m doing it?”

“I don’t know,” Stiles said, daring to put his hands on Derek’s bare waist. There was a whole lot of hard muscle there, but his skin was surprisingly soft. He slid his fingers beneath the waistband of his briefs and got an extremely gratifying shudder in response. “Head injury?”

“I’m a werewolf, you idiot,” Derek retorted, and kissed him again.

“Hallucination? Sex pollen? I’ve seen Star Trek, okay—”

Derek growled, and then his hands were on Stiles’s hips, lifting him effortlessly onto the desk and insinuating himself between his thighs. Stiles groaned, wrapping his legs around Derek to drag him closer, and Derek dropped his head to nose at his jaw. When he spoke, he sounded caught between laughter and exasperation. It was a familiar tone, and it was all kinds of weird to hear it under the circumstances. “Are you planning on talking this whole time?”

“I’m sorry, have you met me? You know better than— oh God, fuck, fuck, do that again.”

“Hm?” Derek lifted his head, his expression smugly, sweetly teasing in a way that Stiles had _never_ seen. It made something twist sharply inside of him, made him drag Derek back down for another kiss, graceless and entirely lacking in finesse. Derek was still smiling when he pulled back. “What, this?”

He leaned back in, his mouth opening hot and lewd and wet over Stiles’s pulse point, and Stiles was going to be embarrassed about how undone he was just from that _another time._

“Yeah,” he managed, and felt Derek grin, the sharp edges of teeth just scraping his skin. “That.”

“Hmm,” Derek said again, and then his rough hands were sliding up Stiles’s sides, bringing his t-shirt up with them. “Get this off.”

Stiles shivered and lifted his arms, allowing Derek to peel the damp t-shirt off over his head and toss it somewhere on the dark floor behind them. The air was warm inside, almost stuffy, but he shivered anyway, fought the impulse to cross his arms over his chest. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of his body, but he knew that even at nineteen, he had a lanky, unfinished kind of look, and Derek was… well, he looked like Derek.

Derek was looking at him with eyes that were dark and glittering, though, and when he slid his hands over Stiles’s ribs again there was a possessive heat to the gesture that made Stiles flush. His heart was racing. Derek had to be able to hear it.

“Pants, too,” he said hoarsely.

Stiles laughed, breathless, but he was already obeying. He kicked his shoes off first so they wouldn’t hobble him. “Are you always this bossy in bed?”

“We’re not in bed.”

“Pedant.” He unbuckled his belt and started on his fly, then paused. “Wait. It just occurred to me, but— I’m not sure how long I have before I just kind of vanish into thin air, potentially at a very inconvenient moment for both of us.”

Derek raised his eyebrows. “Do you want to stop?”

“Huh.” Stiles gave that the three seconds of consideration that it deserved, then said, “Nope, I’m good. Let’s do this.”

“It’s nice to know that you haven’t developed any impulse control while I was away.”

“You love it.” Stiles dropped his head, ostensibly to watch his own fingers undoing his button and fly, but mostly so he wouldn’t have to look at Derek’s face, because that had come out sounding an awful lot like _you love me_.

There was a soft sigh, and then warm fingers closing over his. “Let me,” Derek said quietly.

“Okay,” Stiles breathed, and then he stood there as still as a statue, his heart trying to pound its way out of his chest, while Derek’s rough fingers made quick work of his fly. His jeans slid down his thighs and he kicked them off his feet, then pulled Derek down for another kiss, reaching for his pants with one hand. His fingers fumbled, clumsy on the button fly. “Shouldn’t have made you put these back on,” he mumbled against Derek’s mouth. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“I was thinking the same—” Derek broke off, breathed in sharply, and it was only then that Stiles realized that his knuckles were bumping against Derek’s cock every time he moved.

“Oh,” he said, startled, because while he wasn’t exactly a virgin, his experience of dicks other than his own had been entirely theoretical up to now. “Oh, wow. Can I…”

“ _Stiles_ ,” Derek gritted out through his teeth, his head dropping to Stiles’s shoulder, and yeah, that pretty much sounded like a yes. He slipped his hand inside, curled his fingers around the hard length of Derek’s cock where it was radiating heat through his briefs. The cotton was slightly damp at the head, and when Stiles rubbed his thumb over it Derek shuddered all over and practically fell against him, hands braced on the edge of the table, face pressed into the curve of Stiles’s neck, breath coming hot and quick.

Stiles smothered a grin against his hair. “You like that, huh?”

“You don’t need,” Derek panted, shoving into Stiles’s grip, all graceless little pushes, “to sound so goddamn smug about it.”

“Are you kidding me? I’m going to be smug about this _forever._ ” Stiles pressed kisses to Derek’s hair, his jaw, his cheek, then pulled his hand away and yanked at his jeans. “Off, get these off already, come on—”

Derek let out a breath of laughter, batting Stiles’s hands away before he could inflict any serious and boner-killing damage, shoved his jeans and underwear down and kicked them off in one smooth motion, leaving him naked in the dim light.

“Oh,” Stiles said again, his mouth completely dry. Limned in the warm yellow lamplight, Derek was stupidly perfect, from the muscular slope of his shoulders to his solid thighs to his cock, thick and uncut and curving up toward his belly. Stiles stared for what was probably an inappropriately long time and Derek held still, his eyes on Stiles, and let him look. “I just. God, I hope I’m not hallucinating again.”

“Again?” Derek asked, and then he was stepping into the cradle of Stiles’s open thighs, pressing close, his cock sliding against Stiles’s through a layer of cotton so thin it might as well not have been there at all. “Does this feel like a hallucination?”

“No,” Stiles breathed, “this feels pretty fucking real.”

Derek’s grin was sharp-edged and sweetly wicked. “Good.” He hooked his fingers under the waistband of Stiles’s boxers and tugged. “Get these off.”

“Still bossy,” Stiles said, but he was already shoving his boxers down, kicking them off, dragging Derek closer, and oh, yeah, that was even better. Silky hot skin and the faint slickness of precome, Derek’s cock slipping up against his, his legs scraping rough at the inside of Stiles’s thighs.

“Are you complaining?”

“Does it sound like I’m complaining?” Stiles got a hand down between them, rubbed a thumb over the head of Derek’s cock where it was beading moisture and grinned when he moaned. It was an unexpected rush, having Derek like this, breathing fast and uneven against his skin, thrusting shallowly into his grip, coming undone. “Like that, is that good?”

Derek made a low noise in the back of his throat, his hands coming up to grip Stiles’s sides, bruisingly tight. “It’s good, it’s… fuck.”

“See,” Stiles said, adjusting his grip, jerking Derek’s cock in slow pulls that made him shudder, “see, if I’d been planning on this, I would have brought lube, condoms, the whole deal. You could bend me over the desk and—”

Derek’s fingers tightened convulsively and he let out an explosive breath against Stiles’s neck, and then he was coming in hot pulses over Stiles’s hand, his whole body gone tense and shuddering.

“Oh, wow,” Stiles breathed, “that was so fucking hot,” and he tangled his free hand into Derek’s hair, pulling him into a messy, open-mouthed kiss. Derek made a noise that might have been nonsense, might have been his name, pressing closer, trapping Stiles’s cock between them and smearing come over both of their stomachs. Stiles moaned in the back of his throat at the sudden slippery-hot pressure, and when Derek worked his hand down between them to wrap slick fingers around his cock, it only took a few quick pulls to make him come.

He came down slowly, pleasure still sparking up his spine, to find Derek watching him. His expression was soft and stunned in a way that Stiles could never have pictured. He looked— Stiles would never have imagined that Derek could look like that, much less that Derek could look at _him_ like that.

Of course, because he was himself, when he opened his mouth, what came out was, “So that’s a ‘yes’ on bending me over the desk next time, then?”

Derek let out a surprised burst of laughter and leaned in to kiss Stiles’s mouth again. “God, you’re a pain in the ass,” he murmured, and it didn’t sound like an insult at all.

* * *

“This was so not how I was expecting this to go,” Stiles mumbled some time later. They’d made it over to the mattress, haphazardly cleaned off with the edge of the sheet, and his face was mashed against Derek’s shoulder because Derek, as it turned out, was insistently cuddly after sex. It was the second-best thing that Stiles had learned about him today, after what his face looked like when he came.

Derek’s hand paused briefly before continuing down over Stiles’s back, stopping at the bruises at his hips, his rough palm a warm pressure that was just this side of painful. “Hm?”

“You, me, this…” Stiles propped himself up on one elbow so that he could see Derek’s face. “Come on, I’ve had a thing for you since like forever, that’s not a secret. You’re not that oblivious.”

Derek scrunched his face in a way that Stiles refused to find adorable, then finally sighed. “Okay, no, you’re right. I knew.”

“But you never did anything about it.”

“Neither did you.”

“Yeah, well, you’re terrifyingly hot. And occasionally just terrifying. I had legitimate concerns about my well-being, and also I can’t smell when someone’s attracted to me. What’s your excuse?”

Derek shrugged with one shoulder, his hand resuming its slow track over Stiles’s skin. Finally, he said, “Lydia. And you were a kid.”

“Lydia is in London,” Stiles pointed out, before remembering that she wasn’t, now. Whenever exactly _now_ was. Sometime in 2015. “Will be in London. Year abroad, studying at Oxford, it’s great. For her. Also, I’m not a kid anymore.”

“No,” Derek agreed, leaning up to kiss him. “You’re not. But you’re in high school—”

“College, now, actually.”

“—and I’m currently on the run from the Feds.”

“Currently,” Stiles agreed. “That situation is going to be resolved shortly, though, don’t worry.”

Derek made a face that looked like it couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to be amused or not. “Should you be telling me this?”

“Predestination paradox,” Stiles said, waving a hand. “Anything that I do now already happened. Anyway, I feel like you should be prepared when I heroically rescue your ass from a federal raid in a couple of months.”

“Heroically,” Derek repeated, and his face was definitely amused now.

“It was totally heroic,” Stiles lied blithely, “I lost a toe and everything.”

Even laughing at him— or maybe especially laughing at him— Derek’s face was so open like this, so soft edged and warm, that Stiles had to lean down for another kiss. It didn’t take long for it to turn heated, Derek’s hand sliding up into his hair to cup the back of his head, one strong arm wrapping around Stiles’s back to haul him up so that he was straddling Derek’s hips.

They stopped talking for a while after that.

* * *

It wasn’t until much later, Derek dozing with his face half-buried in the pillow beside him, that it occurred to Stiles that this was the longest he’d ever spent in one time since this whole thing started. That meant… something, probably.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, scrubbing a hand through his hair. Derek shifted slightly when the mattress creaked, the dim light cutting stripes of shadow across his pale skin. Even after all this time in Brazil, it didn’t look like he’d tanned much, if at all. Did werewolves even tan? Add that to the ever-growing list of questions.

“Where are you going?” he mumbled, without lifting his head.

“To get something to drink,” Stiles said. “The water does work here, right? You’re not just squatting?”

Derek made an offended noise into the pillow, which was pretty rich considering that squatting in abandoned buildings wasn’t exactly out of character for him even when he _wasn’t_ on the run from the U.S. government. “There’s running water, but I wouldn’t drink it if I were you. Vending machine out front might have some.”

“Kay.” Stiles leaned over to kiss him, taking his time about it, then stood up and reluctantly began pulling his clothes back on, Derek watching him through heavy-lidded eyes. “I’ll be right back.”

It looked like it was getting close to dawn when he slipped out onto the concrete stoop, the air already stiflingly hot. A tangle of lush greenery was encroaching on the cracked parking lot and he could see neon lights in the distance, but there was nothing nearby but the calls of early-morning birds. He let the door fall shut behind him and padded down toward the ancient-looking vending machine perched cockeyed near the lobby doors, the cool concrete scraping at his bare feet.

He was halfway there when his fingers began to tingle.

“Oh, shit,” Stiles groaned, turning back toward the door to Derek’s room at the far end of the courtyard, “you have to be kidding me…”

Sure enough, the world was beginning to go fuzzy and faded around the edges. He saw— he thought he saw— the door to Derek’s room swing open, his dark head peering out, and then everything else faded, the sidewalk melted away beneath his feet, and he was falling.

* * *

He landed in sand this time, at least. An unpaved turnaround, Mason’s little sedan parked on a stretch of scrub grass. Stiles groaned and lifted his head in time to see Scott and Mason both pop up like a pair of gophers; Deaton was on the other side of the turnaround with a cell phone pressed to his ear. He let his head fall back, squinting in the sudden brightness of full day.

“Stiles? You okay?”

“Considering that this is twice now I’ve Apparated out of the back seat of a car,” Stiles said to the dry blue sky. “I should probably consider myself lucky that I haven’t re-materialized in the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler, like,” he flicked one hand up. “Splat.”

“That’s kinda morbid, man,” Scott said, peering down at him with a frown. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“For your sake, I’m not going to answer that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Scott leaned down, looking worried, and Stiles could see the exact moment when the penny dropped. Scott’s nostrils flared, taking in his scent, and his face went completely blank. “ _Seriously_ , Stiles?”

“What?” Stiles said unrepentantly, pushing himself up on his elbows. “You said to talk to him.”

“Yeah, I said to _talk_ to him, not to—”

“I improvised.”

Mason looked between them, mouth open, then said, “Okay, I’m pretty sure I’m missing something, and I’m also pretty sure I don’t want to know what it is. Can we go now?”

“Good idea,” Stiles said, accepting Scott’s hand up. “Oh, hey, I think I figured out what’s making me jump back. I think it’s a proximity thing.”

“A proximity thing,” Scott repeated, with a cautious note in his voice like he wasn’t quite sure he wanted an explanation.

“Get your mind out of the gutter,” Stiles told him, and grinned when he scowled. “No, I mean, every time I’ve popped back to the future, so to speak, it’s been when me and Derek got more than fifty yards or so apart. We were fine, and then—” he made an explosive gesture with both hands. “Poof.”

“Makes sense,” Scott said after a moment. “I mean, she is basically, like, mashing your faces together like a little kid with her Barbie dolls, right? So if you get too far apart—”

“Reset, start over.” Stiles flexed his bare feet in the hot sand, wishing he’d thought to put his shoes back on. “Although maybe not, now.”

Reluctantly, Scott said, “You think she’s, uh… satisfied now?”

Stiles bit down hard on his lower lip before he could say any of the first five responses that came to mind.

“Maybe?” he managed finally. He could hear laughter leaking out at the edges of his voice, and going by Scott’s exasperated expression and Mason’s uncomfortable one, so could everyone else. It wasn’t even really that funny, but he couldn’t let himself think too much about what had just happened, couldn’t let himself dwell on how or even _if_ it changed things. Derek hadn’t mentioned anything, after all, and he’d had ample opportunity over the past year or so. He could have decided that the whole thing had been a hallucination. Or worse, a mistake. “I guess we’ll see.”

“I guess,” Scott said. He looked like he was regretting his entire life, or at least his decision to continue associating with Stiles, but Stiles knew better than to take it personally. “Can we go now? Derek is going to be at your house any minute now. You can talk to _him_ about it.” _Instead of me_ , was unspoken but heavily implied.

“Oh.” Somehow, he’d managed to forget that. Well, shit. “Yeah, great, okay. Let’s go.”

* * *

Sure enough, there was a sleek black Camaro parked crookedly in the driveway when they turned the corner onto his street, Derek leaning against the hood.

Despite the heat, he was wearing his leather jacket, and he was hunched into it like he was cold. Or like he was in pain. Something about that posture put a sharp needle of unease through the pit of Stiles’s stomach, and the look on Derek’s face when they pulled in and cut the engine didn’t help. He went tense and bloodhound-still as soon as Stiles climbed out of the back seat, and it was jarring in the worst way, that furious intensity contrasted with his relaxed post-coital drowsiness from an hour ago. Or a year and a half ago. Depending on how you measured it.

God, this was weird.

“Stiles,” Derek said sharply. His eyes scanned Stiles face, his body, like he was looking for something. What, Stiles had no clue.

“Hey, Derek.” He heard the other doors slam shut, feet on the pavement. “So, uh…”

Derek’s mouth twisted, and then he was stepping forward into Stiles’s space. _Way_ into his space, actually. Stiles shuffled back involuntarily, feet burning on the hot asphalt, and Derek’s hand shot out to catch at his arm with a bruising grip, stilling him.

“Take your shirt off,” he ordered. Stiles gulped, heat rushing to his cheeks, even though the look that Derek was giving him was intense in a decidedly non-sexy way. Or at least, as non-sexy as any of Derek’s looks were ever going to be, given his face.

“What?”

“Take. Your shirt. Off.” Derek bit off each word through his teeth. “Or I’ll—”

“What, hold me down and strip me in the middle of my driveway, in front of God and everyone? I realize we haven’t had a lot of time to define the parameters of our relationship, here, but that’s one kink I’m not— oh my God, fine, whatever, it’s not like you haven’t already seen it all before.” He yanked his t-shirt over his head, letting it dangle from one hand. “Happy?”

Derek didn’t look happy. His brow furrowed as he scanned Stiles’s torso like he was looking for something in particular, then lifted a hand, hesitated, and brushed his fingers over the skin there, so lightly it was almost ticklish. Stiles could feel himself reddening; Derek’s touch was more clinical than anything, but it was too easy to compare to Derek of an hour ago, digging bruises into his skin and gasping against his throat as he came.

Derek had to be able to feel it— if he couldn’t just _see_ it, Stiles knew exactly how blotchy and obvious he was when he blushed— but he didn’t say anything. It seemed like a long time later when he finally stepped back, tucking his hands back into his jacket pockets, and met Stiles’s eyes at last. “You’re not hurt.”

“Should I be?”

“No, you…” Derek looked over his shoulder at Scott and Deaton standing back by the car, Mason hopping out of the driver’s seat and slinging his backpack over his shoulder. “You said you were time-traveling.”

“You know, I kind of was wondering why you were so quick to believe me,” Stiles said. “I guess I know now, huh?”

Derek’s eyes snapped back to him. “What?”

“Brazil,” Stiles said. He pulled his t-shirt back on and scrubbed his hands over his arms, trying to look casual. Failing, probably. “2015. Remember that?”

Something softened, almost imperceptibly, in Derek’s face. “I remember.”

“Yeah, that was like an hour ago for me. Were you ever planning on _telling me?_ ”

“Do we need to do this now?” Derek asked. “It’s not important.”

“I kind of feel like it is important, actually,” Stiles said, trying, with mixed success, to swallow back the punch of hurt. Derek was an asshole; that wasn’t news, and the more something mattered to him, the more of an asshole he was. Stiles was usually pretty good about not taking that kind of thing personally. Usually. “Very important. What, did you think it was a hallucination or something? Because—”

“I knew it was you,” Derek interrupted. “I knew it was real. But it’s really not important right now. Trust me, Stiles.”

“Why the hell is it not…” Stiles trailed off as Derek shifted back, his jacket gaping open. He was wearing a green t-shirt under it— or at least, it looked like it might have been green in a previous life. Now, though, it was covered in rusty, red-brown stains. A giant smear across the middle of his chest, the material dried stiff; gory streaks like fingerprints on his shoulders. Exactly like fingerprints. Like someone with bloody hands had been clinging to him for dear life and bleeding all over him, and Stiles kind of hated that he knew exactly what that looked like.

“Oh,” Scott murmured, his voice thick with sudden horror. “Shit.”

“Whose…” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Whose blood is that?”

Derek looked up at him. His face was pale and drawn, and Stiles knew the answer before he even opened his mouth, had maybe known the answer since the moment he saw that awful look on Derek’s face. “It’s yours.”


	3. The End of All Tomorrows

 

“Okay,” Stiles said, completing his third circuit of the kitchen and pausing by the counter, drumming his fingers on the sticky surface. Dad had been cutting apples here without a cutting board again, which was something Stiles was going to yell at him about some other time when he wasn’t concerned with his imminent and grisly demise. “Okay, this is a solvable problem.”

“Yeah,” Scott said, with an encouraging expression. “Totally solvable.”

“I mean, maybe it won’t happen at all? Right? It’s probably not going to happen, we gave her what she wanted—”

“Predestination paradox,” Derek interrupted. He’d stripped out of the blood-stained green shirt at least and borrowed one of Stiles’s. It fit like it had been painted on, which was something Stiles would have found incredibly distracting in very different circumstances. Right now, he was just glad that his nose wasn’t good enough to detect the lingering smell of blood.

“Really? You just pulled that out of thin air?”

“You told me,” Derek said impatiently. “Everything that you’ll do has already happened in the past.”

“When did I…” Stiles trailed off, blinked, remembered the slow thud of Derek’s heart beneath his cheek and his laughing voice overhead. It felt like it could have been a lifetime ago. “Oh. You remembered that?”

Derek gave him a look that could have been frustrated, or furious, or something else entirely, mouth hard and eyes glittering. “Yes.”

“Okay, okay, I just—” He spread his hands out. “We gave the spell what it wanted, right? We did what she wanted, we—”

“I really don’t need the details,” Scott said hastily.

“I really don’t care about your delicate sensibilities,” Stiles said, rounding on him, “considering I’m apparently about to go back in time and die horribly and we still don’t know how to stop it!”

Scott looked suitably abashed at that, at least. “Sorry. Deaton, you got anything?”

“I’m still looking,” Deaton said absently from the kitchen table, where he and Mason were bent over a stack of textbooks, Stiles’s phone with the images from the altar, and the laptop Stiles had liberated from his dad’s office. “There may be another way to interpret the vision that Stiles had in the temple.”

“It was pretty fucking hard to misinterpret, okay,” Stiles said. “I knew it, she wants me dead, I’m so totally fucked. Literally and metaphorically in this case, although at least the literal part of it was fun—”

“Stiles,” Derek sighed.

“Don’t even start,” Stiles said sharply, and scrubbed a hand over his face before he could launch into the rest of the rant he could feel building up behind his teeth. It wasn’t the time or the place. They could have it out later. If there was a later for him. “Okay, look, just— how did it happen, again? Maybe we can interrupt it. I haven’t known beforehand what happened any other time, it’s a new variable, that changes everything. Or it could change everything. If I know what happened, I know what not to do.”

“I don’t think it—” Derek stopped and shook his head. Looked down at his hands and curled them into fists. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and measured. “We were cornered in a warehouse. Surrounded by hunters. There was an explosion, you were pinned by debris. You told us to run.”

“And you did?” Stiles asked, because even if he’d been wrong about everything between the two of them, that sounded pretty out of character. Derek had been willing to put his ass on the line for Stiles even back at the very beginning, before they were ever anything other than reluctant allies. He wasn’t a person who would just leave somebody behind. Not without a damn good reason.

“We didn’t know if there’d be time—” Derek looked away, his jaw clenching. “It doesn’t matter. Now that you know, you can run before anything happens. You can get out of there.”

That… actually could work. If he was right about the proximity thing, getting far enough away from Derek would trigger the jump back to the present. That would give them more _time_ , anyway.

There was the soft noise of a throat clearing, and then Deaton said, “I may have something, actually.”

“ _Please_ tell me you have something,” Stiles said, as the three of them converged on the table. Derek was at his shoulder, so close that their elbows bumped, radiating heat. Flushing, Stiles tucked his arm back against his body, and when he looked up again Scott was watching him with a sympathetic expression.

Sometimes it really fucking sucked, being so obvious.

“Here,” Deaton was saying, indicating a block of text, and Stiles dragged his attention back. More important things, right now, than his travesty of a love life. “Ananke is also the mother— or in some variations, the other self— of Adrasteia, who is associated, among other things, with rewards and punishments.”

“Ominous,” Stiles remarked, leaning toward the text. “So what does that mean?”

“Well, it could simply mean that this entire episode is intended as a lesson.” Deaton looked up, finally, and spread his hands. “Or she could be attempting to enact her revenge on you. The Greek deities were notoriously fond of disproportionate retribution for any perceived slight.”

“I thought you said you had something helpful,” Stiles said. “This doesn’t sound helpful. That sounds terrifying, actually.”

“I wasn’t done,” Deaton said mildly. “It may still be possible to appease her.”

“Okay, great. How?”

“A blood sacrifice is traditional. The Greeks sacrificed oxen, goats, bulls…”

“A _blood sacrifice_? Yeah, great, that sounds awesome and totally practical, let’s do that.” Stiles pushed his hand back into his hair, trying to think. “If the pattern holds, we don’t have enough time to drive back out to the temple before I jump again, anyway. Anything else?”

“I already told you my idea,” Derek said. “Run.”

“Yeah, I heard you. And I admit, it’s better than your usual plan of ‘bite the problem with pointy werewolf teeth until it goes away’, but—”

“You’re not a werewolf,” Derek interrupted. “Stiles. If you land there, you should run. No matter what you hear, no matter what you see. Just run.”

Stiles turned to look at him. His face still looked drawn, the skin stretched sharply over the bone, his light green eyes intent. There was a thumbprint of dried blood at the corner of his jaw that he must have missed when he was washing up earlier, like someone had been reaching for his face…

He tore his eyes away. “Okay, fine. Stick to my strengths, right?”

It came out more bitter than he’d intended. Something shifted in Derek’s expression, but he just nodded. “Thank you.”

“We’re going to figure this out,” Scott interjected earnestly from the other side of the table. “But we need you to stay alive if we’re going to do that.”

“Yeah, I’m…” Stiles paused, lifting a hand. The pads of his fingers were stinging faintly. As he watched, they began to turn translucent, wavering like a painting underwater. “Shit. Already?”

“What?” Derek said sharply. “What is it?”

“He’s jumping again,” Scott said anxiously. “Stiles—”

“Hold on,” Derek said. “Just— I don’t know, concentrate—”

“I _can’t,_ ” Stiles snapped. The room was blurring at the edges, the colors fading, the angles going soft and strange. “That’s not how it works, I can’t just—”

“Okay.” Derek’s hands were on his shoulders, yanking him around to face him. His face was white beneath his beard. Scared, Stiles realized with a jolt. He looked scared. No. _Terrified_. “Just run, okay? Stiles, promise me that you’ll run.”

“I—” Stiles began, but then Derek’s fingers were slipping coldly through his arm and everything else was fading, leaving only the memory of his face like the afterimage of an explosion as he fell.

* * *

He landed hard on pavement in the dim stillness of pre-dawn. Mexico. Even if he hadn’t been expecting it, a neon sign on the far end of the street advertised a bar called _Los Dos Vaqueros_ in lurid green, complete with a blinking lasso overhead. This end of the street was dark, though, surrounded by looming factory buildings and a damp smell of mold. Stiles rolled, got his hands under him, and pushed himself up to his feet, aching down to his bones. After the day he’d been having, his bruises had bruises. The cut on his hand and the scratches on his arms still stung distantly.

His neck was prickling as he turned slowly in place. Everything seemed quiet, but Derek had to be nearby. Him and the hunters. Better not to move until he knew which direction to run _from._ If he could just get out of range before the shit went down, he’d be okay.

His conscience twinged a little at that, but Derek was right. He was no hero. The most he could accomplish here was to get himself killed.

There was a scrape of sound at the far end of the alley. A faint clatter of metal, like some careless foot had kicked a tin can against the wall, then footsteps.

Right, so that was his cue to—

“ _Esperen_ ,” someone hissed. Not someone. _Derek._ Stiles froze instinctively. It sounded like Derek was at the far end of the alley, and he wasn’t alone. There was a quick patter of other footsteps; two or three at least. No, make that four. He was pretty sure there were four of them.

“ _Deberiamos apurarnos—”_

That was a kid’s voice, piping and thin. Oh, shit, those were kids. Derek had been down here working to get the San Felipe pack out before the hunters closed in on them, but if he was sneaking through an alley in the dead of night with a bunch of kids, that probably meant that negotiations had gone south in a really serious way. Blood and scorched earth serious. God damn it. Of course he had neglected to mention that, the bastard.

“ _Esperen,_ ” Derek repeated, in a low growl. “ _Alguien está aquí_.”

 _Nope_ , Stiles thought, stepping back. _Nobody here, nobody to see—_

His conscience was twinging harder, but Derek was basically Wolverine in a better-looking package; he could handle this. He could probably handle it a lot better without having to worry about Stiles fumbling into the middle of his delicate rescue op. He took another step back, then another, and he was nearly back at the street proper when he heard more footsteps. Heavy footsteps, booted feet on the pavement, and closing in fast. He shrank back into the shadows as three men in tac gear approached from the far end of the street. Long rifles slung over their shoulders glinting in the moonlight, and they moved like a unit, military-trained.

“Hauseman, move in,” one of them men murmured into a mic in unaccented English. American, then. He hadn’t thought that Monroe’s people had made it this far south; the Calaveras were bad enough, but at least they kept to the code. They were assholes, but they were, for the most part, honorable assholes. Monroe’s attack dogs, though—

Fuck, this was bad.

 _Get out of here,_ Stiles told himself, _just start walking, pretend you’re a dumb drunk American college student and get the hell out of here before it’s too late, you already know how this ends for you._

He didn’t move.

“Copy,” the man said. “We have them cut off on Avenida Álvaro. Be ready to move in on my order. We can force them to the choke point if we need to; the warehouse is already rigged.” Another pause, the person on the other end of the line speaking too quietly to hear, and then the guy actually laughed. “Yeah, man, don’t worry, we took care of all the big bad wolves back at _el rancho_. These are all just puppies. Easy peasy.”

A hot, unexpected bolt of fury slammed through Stiles, and he had a stupid but very strong impulse to dive out of the shadows swinging for this asshole’s head. His fingers itched for his bat.

The guy was between him and the main street, the alley behind him. His ears weren’t nearly good enough to hear breathing from this distance, but he was pretty sure Derek and the kids were still there in the alleyway. The other end must have been blocked, or they would have run already.

“On my mark,” the hunter said, and he was moving closer, unhooking his rifle and setting the butt against his shoulder as he closed in. And yeah, now Stiles could hear skittering footsteps, a low, rumbling growl that had to be Derek, preparing for some stupid, futile, suicidal last stand.

He wasn’t consciously aware of making the decision. All he knew was that the hunter was moving in past him, close enough that he could smell stale cigarettes and sweat, and the next moment he was leaping out of the shadows to land on the guy’s back, sending him crashing into the far wall.

It was just complete dumb luck that the gun slipped out of the guy’s hand, the strap tangling around his wrist as he drew back to swing at Stiles. Stiles slammed his elbow into his face, feeling the sting reverberate up his arm as bone crunched beneath the joint and the guy went down hard and didn’t move.

There were hands grabbing at him, the sound of a gun being cocked shockingly loud at close range, and then the snarling was suddenly a lot closer and a fast, growling shape slammed out of the darkness toward the other two hunters.

The one that had been clawing at Stiles went down with a choked-off scream and then there was just one guy between them and the street. Stiles reached down, fingers closing around the nylon strap for the rifle. He yanked it back as the man fell, grabbing for the stock and barrel and swinging the gun toward the final hunter in a way that he hoped looked like he knew what he was doing.

From the way the guy’s eyes went huge in the dim light, he suspected he’d succeeded. Derek rose up beside him, hulking and silent, his fangs smeared with blood. Stiles glanced at him, then grinned at the hunter, all teeth. “You should run while you still can.”

He was pretty sure he heard Derek snort, but the hunter’s eyes went even wider, and he gabbled something incoherent, jerked to a halt, and then fled, all flailing limbs and panic.

“Huh,” Stiles said, peering after him. “I totally did not expect that to work.”

Hands on his shoulders, and then his back met the brick wall, Derek looming angrily into his field of vision. The gun slipped out of Stiles’s hands and clattered to the ground, and fortunately didn’t go off and blow a hole in one of them. Derek was still wolfed-out, and his hands felt like brands, his claws popping fabric and scraping skin. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Making some really bad life choices, apparently,” Stiles said, shoving at him. “Get off me, asshole. We don’t have time for this.”

Derek’s grip relaxed slightly, his claws retracting. “Did you bring your Jeep? We need—”

“Unfortunately, no. I’m operating on an alternate mode of transportation.” Derek just stared at him with glowing blue eyes, and he shrugged. “Time travel, dude. I just popped out of thin air. Like in your motel room last year, I know you remember that.”

Derek released him abruptly, stepping back, shifting back until he was fully human. “I remember.”

“So, yeah,” Stiles said, because this was _so_ not the time. “I hope you have another ride.”

“So do I,” Derek sighed, then turned his head back and added, without raising his voice, “ _Vamos, es seguro._ ”

There was a cough, then soft footsteps on the pavement as the kids approached. There were five of them, not four, the youngest a toddler perched on the hip of a lanky boy who looked about thirteen. Her dark curls were pulled back in pigtails, soft fur covering her cheeks; Stiles caught a glimpse of glowing yellow eyes before she buried her face in the older boy’s shoulder.

The rest of them looked human, tear-stained and shell-shocked in torn pajamas. The oldest boy had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and one girl was carrying a Spider Man backpack. Two of them were barefoot.

It did not, in short, look like the product of an orderly evacuation. It looked like they’d been shoved out the door in the middle of the night with whatever they could grab.

“Where’s the rest of the pack?” Stiles asked quietly, dreading the answer.

Derek shook his head sharply. “This is it. Their alpha— my contact, Manuela— she got them out. Got word to me. The rest of the pack is dead.”

“Jesus,” Stiles breathed, looking at the hard set of the oldest boy’s jaw, the way the two bigger girls were holding hands, the other boy— eight or nine, _maybe_ , pressing close, bumping shoulders like he was afraid of what would happen if he lost contact. Four sets of wet dark eyes peering suspiciously up at him. The Bautista Pack had been secure here for decades, from the way Derek had made it sound when he first went down to talk to them. Stable, which meant large. “How many of them?”

“Twenty. At least.” Derek’s voice was flat. “She thought she could negotiate.”

That might have worked on the Calaveras, assuming they didn’t turn new wolves. Not with the kind of fanatics that followed Monroe, though. Stiles looked back at the kids, then shoved a hand through his hair. “Okay, shit. What’s the plan?”

“Brazil. I have a driver who can get them new papers and get them on a flight out tonight; there’s a pack in Macapá that’s taking in refugees. But we have to hurry. We’re already running late, and she’s not going to wait for us too long.”

“No heroes among smugglers, huh?”

“She’s an omega,” Derek said flatly, and Stiles winced. “She’s putting herself in enough danger just by being here with hunters in the area.”

“Okay,” Stiles began, but before he could finish the sentence there was a shriek of static at his feet, from where the radio was still attached to the blond guy who’d been giving orders.

_“Peterson, come in, Peterson. Units three and four are in place, waiting on your order.”_

“Shit,” Stiles hissed. “We should go.”

“You think?” Derek jerked his chin at the kids. “ _Vamos. Necesitamos apurarnos.”_

“ _Eso es lo que te dije_ ,” muttered the oldest kid, swiping his free hand over his face. He gave Stiles a teary, narrow-eyed glare as he made his way closer, the three younger ones trailing in his wake like ducklings. “ _Es otro cazador?_ ”

“No,” Derek said, and glanced at Stiles. “ _Es un amigo. Vamos._ ”

“Yeah,” Stiles added, bending down to scoop the radio up. “ _Vamos_. I’m harmless, I promise. Which way are we going?”

Derek snorted as he fell into step beside him. “North.”

“That would be very helpful if I was a passenger pigeon.”

“That way,” Derek added, jerking his chin toward the darkened end of the street. “Now shut up.”

“Yeah, yeah, I missed you too,” Stiles said, then subsided at Derek’s glare.

It was quiet in here, the rosy fingers of dawn just starting to creep over the horizon. All the buildings looked industrial, blank-faced and featureless, garbage strewn in the cracked streets. It was, Stiles thought with some concern, probably a great place for an ambush. It didn’t look like anybody came down here this time of day. No inconvenient bystanders to ask questions about why a bunch of Americans in tac gear were gunning down kids.

Derek was out in front, since he was the only one who seemed to know where he was going, Stiles bringing up the rear. The oldest boy was right in front of him, and he could see the toddler peering over his shoulder, all tiny wolf-face and wide glowing eyes. It was kind of ridiculously cute. He’d never seen a werewolf kid that young before. Did they stay wolfed-out all the time, or was it just because she was scared, or—

The radio hissed to life again, and Stiles jerked. _“All units come in. Peterson’s down, Jacobs is dead. No sign of Hargrove. Looks like they went up Avenida Álvaro—”_

It cut off suddenly.

“Must have figured out we have the radio,” Stiles muttered. “We’re close, right? Tell me we’re close.”

“We’re close,” Derek said, and then paused, sniffing the air. Fur rippled over his face as he shifted, lips pulling back from his fangs, and Stiles felt his heart thump sharply. “They have us cut off on the east end of the street.”

“Do they—”

“They don’t know where we are yet,” Derek interrupted. “But we can’t go down that way.”

“And we can’t go back.”

Derek shook his head sharply. He turned slowly in place, like he was looking for something, and Stiles found himself hoping that they weren’t going to try to go over the roofs. He knew _he_ couldn’t do it. The oldest kid maybe could, but not the rest of them. Even if they were werewolves, they were werewolves with short legs.

“We’ll have to take a shortcut,” Derek said finally. He crossed to the far side of the street, where a looming windowless brick building squatted, the battered metal door spray-painted with graffiti that Stiles couldn’t read. He paused for another moment, head tilted like he was listening, and then in a sudden violent motion tore the door off its hinges, flinging it aside with a heavy _clang_ that seemed shockingly loud in the dim pre-dawn silence. “Come on. _Venga._ ”

The kids followed him inside, clustered together so closely that their shoulders were bumping. Stiles hesitated in the doorway.

 _We can force them to the choke point_ , the guy had said. _The warehouse is already rigged._

And: _There was an explosion, you were pinned by the debris._

Shit. _Shit._

“Stop,” he snapped, flinging out a hand, as the kids stepped over the threshold. He remembered a second later that they couldn’t understand him, but it didn’t matter; his tone had been enough. They froze as one, turning to stare back at him with wide eyes. Derek, a step ahead of them and half-shrouded in the gloom already, tilted his chin, looking impatient.

“We have to _go_.”

“Just— oh my God, just hang on for two seconds,” Stiles said, pushing up to the front. “Look, what if we’re playing right into their hands, what if—”

“We don’t have time for this, Stiles,” Derek snapped, starting to move. Stiles put his hand out without thinking and grabbed his sleeve, dragged at him. It wasn’t like he had a hope in hell of moving Derek if Derek didn’t want to be moved, but Derek paused, glanced down at him again. It was harder to read his expressions when he was wolfed out; Stiles couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“Would you just _wait_ ,” he said again, digging through his pockets with his free hand. “I think they wanted us here, the guy on the radio said—” He came up with his cell phone, thumbed the flashlight app on, then breathed, “Oh, shit.”

The beam of light didn’t penetrate far into the dark, cavernous space, but it was plenty to light up the first few yards of cracked tile floor and the gleaming wire suspended in midair six inches from Derek’s shin. It ran several yards back, between the legs of a looming, half-built piece of scaffolding, and attached to a dark green plastic box with the words ‘FRONT TOWARD ENEMY’ stamped on its face.

“That’s,” Stiles said, and swallowed. He couldn’t stop staring at the wire. Six inches from Derek’s leg, maybe less. If he’d taken one more step— “That’s a bomb. Isn’t it.”

Derek’s arm was warm and tense beneath his fingers. It took him a moment to speak. “M18 Claymore mine.” He cleared his throat, then said, “Yes. It’s a bomb.”

“Okay,” Stiles said numbly. “So we should probably. Go. Find another way.”

“We don’t have time,” Derek said again, but he didn’t sound impatient this time, just resigned. He glanced back at the kids, who were still clustered together, staring wide-eyed at the bomb. “ _No lo toquen. Entienden?_ ”

“ _Sí_ ,” the oldest boy said, sounding subdued. He reached without looking for the second-oldest girl’s hand and tugged her back; the younger two were clinging to his jeans. “ _Entendemos._ ”

“ _Bien. Vamos._ ”

“For the record,” Stiles said as they skirted the tripwire, holding his phone up to illuminate their surroundings so that they didn’t walk into any more nasty surprises, “I think this is a really bad idea. I just want that noted, I’m doing this under protest.”

Derek glanced back, flashing him a brief, sharp-edged smile. “Noted.”

At least there didn’t seem to be any more booby-traps. Other than the scaffolding, the vast space seemed empty, lit only by Stiles’s phone. There was another door on the far side, and that’s where Derek seemed to be headed; the building was wide enough that it probably opened up onto the next street over.

They were halfway through and the hollow, shaky feeling in Stiles’s gut was beginning to subside when Derek froze, turning back toward the door they’d come through, his eyes flashing blue.

“What?” Stiles hissed. “What is it?”

“Quiet,” Derek said shortly, and an instant later, Stiles heard them too. Footsteps, heavy boots on stone. Voices. He hastily thumbed the light on his phone off, pressed close to Derek, instinctively putting himself between the kids and the door. Skinny too-hot bodies and the smell of sweat, fast panicky breathing. One of them— the baby, he thought— was whining low in their throat. He just hoped none of them started crying out loud, or they were fucked.

They were probably fucked anyway. There was nowhere to hide in here if the hunters decided to come looking and the missing door was a hell of a giveaway.

Derek’s shoulder bumped his as he moved closer, warm and tense, a long line of heat against his side. He was growling, a subsonic rumble in his chest, and Stiles reached out to grip his wrist, feeling warm tense skin beneath his fingers.

“...go through here?” one of the hunters was saying. “Doesn’t look like they triggered it.”

“What, you think the door just fell off like that? They’re in here. Could be something wrong with the mechanism, who fuckin’ knows if Hernandez actually knows what he’s doing like he says— I said _could be_ , you dumbshit, stay away from it.”

“Okay, okay, Jesus fucking Christ, keep your hair on.” A hiss of static, and then the guy added, “All units come in. I think we got the little fuckers.”

More footsteps, a shadow looming in the doorway. “Just be careful, man, I think they got a full-grown one with ‘em. None of the smaller ones coulda managed to do that.”

“I don’t know, I think the older juvenile maybe could,” said the second man, “but still—”

There was a click, and Stiles realized what was happening an instant before a beam of light swept the room. He shoved the closest girl back, his foot kicking at a piece of wood that clattered away across the floor, and he winced at the sound like it even mattered now, with two heavily armed hunters staring at them from behind the beam of the flashlight.

There was a sharp gleam of teeth, and the man holding the light said, “Gotcha.”

“Run,” Stiles said through numb lips. There were two more guys with guns in the doorway now, and the one holding the flashlight was lifting his rifle, grinning a rictus smile, and this was not, this could not be happening.

A gasping sob from one of the girls. “ _Van a matarnos como mataron a Mamá—_ ”

“ _No van a matar a nadie,_ ” Derek snapped, shoving her back, shoving all of them back, his broad body between them and the door like a shield. “ _Corran!_ ”

Stiles swore and stooped as the kids scrambled back, snatching up the board he’d just kicked like it was a weapon that could help them now and wishing suddenly, desperately, that he’d thought to keep the gun from those first hunters. He was a lousy shot, but still—

The smiling hunter’s hand moved, the light of his flashlight gleaming suddenly on the wire still strung across the room as he pulled the bolt of his rifle back, and without thinking, without planning it, Stiles flung the board as hard as he could toward the tripwire.

He’d never been much of an athlete, not really, but even he couldn’t miss at this range. The board landed on the wire, bowing it visibly before clattering to the floor. The hunter jerked his head up to stare at him.

The world exploded into thunder and searing light. A sudden weightlessness caught him, and he was in freefall, the air burning around him, and then there was a sharp agonizing jolt, and everything went dark.

* * *

“Stiles! _Stiles!_ ”

His chest was a mass of screaming agony. There were hands on him, rough and warm, skittering over his skin like they didn’t know how or where to touch, lifting briefly, then tilting his face up, pressing hard enough into his cheekbones to hurt, like their owner had briefly forgotten his own strength. Stiles opened his eyes to see a worried face looming into his field of view.

Derek looked shocked and pale, a fine spray of blood dusting his cheek. Dazed, Stiles lifted a hand to touch it.

Something _shifted_ horribly inside him, and pain whited out his vision. He might have screamed, he couldn’t tell; there was an awful blank space where he couldn’t think or breathe or even tell where his body was or what it was doing, everything hot and red and burning.

“—move, don’t _move_ , Stiles, you have to hold still.” Hands on his shoulders, fingers digging painfully into the muscle. “Can you hear me? Hold still.”

“Wh—” Stiles coughed, tasted blood. Something was wrong with his chest. Something was… something was really fucking wrong. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t _breathe._ “What ha-happened?”

“You’re pinned by some debris.” Derek was still holding his shoulders down, leaning down until he was all Stiles could see. He could hear thin piping voices a few paces back. One of them— or maybe more than one of them— was crying. “You need to hold still.”

“Th’ kids?”

“Fine. We’re all fine. Hold still.”

 _All except the hunters_ went unspoken. He’d just killed— God, four people. Maybe more, depending on how close backup had been. Bad people, but still. Maybe he should have felt something about that, but he was selfish, he’d always been selfish, and everything hurt too goddamn much to think.

“Oh,” Derek said out loud, like he’d heard the thought, and then the pain was leaving him in a sudden rush. Stiles blinked watering eyes to see threads of black climbing Derek’s arms and throat, his jaw grit suddenly, expression going tense with concentration.

“Thanks,” he wheezed. He didn’t hurt anymore, but he still couldn’t take a deep breath. His chest seemed full of wet crushing pressure, all the weirder now that it wasn’t drowned in a sea of pain. _Pinned by debris,_ Derek had said. Before he could think better of it, he lifted his head to look.

Immediately, he wished he hadn’t.

The blast must have knocked over the scaffolding, sending it down in a twisted nest of torn metal that was partially suspended over him. There was a metal pipe, maybe two inches wide, jutting straight up like it had been planted there, and it took Stiles several awful, baffled seconds to understand that it didn’t just _look_ like it had been planted in his rib cage, that the spreading dark stain on his shirt was blood. He’d been speared like a bug on a pin, so deep that it didn’t even move with his gasping breaths.

“Oh, God,” he whispered, dropping his head back. He could feel his gorge rising and swallowed it back, since puking right now might actually, literally kill him. At least Derek hadn’t tried to pull the fucking thing out and bring the rest of the scaffolding down on his face. “Fuck, oh my God.”

“You’re going to be fine,” Derek said, but his face was white, and he didn’t look like he believed it. “Just— I’ll get you out of here, and you’re going to be fine.”

He looked shocked and lost and young, in a way that, absurdly, made Stiles want to comfort _him_. Too bad there wasn’t time for that. There wasn’t time for any of this, and anyway, he already knew how this had to go. He already knew how it _had_ gone. “You should. You should go.”

“No.” The word came out as a snarl.

“Don’t. D-don’t be stupid.” Derek had his jaw set in a way that meant he was planning on being very stupid indeed. It was an expression Stiles had become intimately familiar with over the years. He reached for Derek’s arms where they were pinning him down, fisting his bloody hands in the green fabric of his t-shirt. It was already soaked through, plastered wetly against Derek’s body. It was a lot of blood. It was— it was a whole hell of a lot of blood, and Stiles had seen way too many torn-up bodies, but he still couldn’t believe how much blood one person could hold. And most of his seemed to be smeared all over Derek.

He wasn’t going anywhere, and they both knew it. “You said your driver. Said she won’t wait. Go _._ ”

Derek glanced back at the kids, clustered together with teary faces. “I can— we could—”

“No.” Of all the fucking moments for him to develop a sense of optimism. “You can’t. _Go._ ”

“Stiles—”

“Might. Might be more hunters.” It was getting harder to talk, the words choking in his throat, so if Derek would just _stop fucking arguing_ for once in his life, that would be great. “Fucking _go_ , Derek. Get them out of here.”

_Go, goddamn you, I’m not bleeding out on the fucking floor just so you guys can get caught or killed or stranded here, don’t make me keep doing this, I’m not a hero, I’m not you, I can’t keep telling you to leave me for dead, just go before I try to beg you to stay._

He couldn’t say any of it. His breath was rattling in his throat, and his mouth seemed full of the taste of blood. Derek’s hands were on his face again. He leaned down, and then he was kissing Stiles, fast and brutal and desperate, almost painful. When he pulled back there was blood on his lips. “I’ll come back for you. There aren’t any hunters close by, you should be— I’ll come back for you. I promise.”

Stiles tilted his chin down, tried without avail to catch his breath. “I know.”

Derek kissed him again, hard, and stood. Even now, with the decision made, he seemed to be wavering, unable to make his feet move.

“Go,” Stiles said again. “I’ll be right here,” and he was suddenly, horribly grateful that just this once, there was no way Derek would hear the lie.

Finally, reluctantly, Derek took a step back toward the kids. The smaller of the two girls reached for his hand, staring at Stiles with wide, horrified eyes, and he felt obscurely bad about that, suddenly, about being one more nightmare for these kids in a day that had clearly already had too many of them.

But they’d be safe. They’d be okay, or as okay as they possibly could be after all of this.

“I’ll be right back,” Derek said finally, and then they were gone.

Stiles let his eyes slip closed, listening to the patter of feet on the concrete floor, the metallic creak of the door and the silence that followed. He was too numb to tell whether or not his fingers were tingling, but he could feel the moment when Derek finally got out of range, that strange sense of displacement.

There was a sudden burst of agony in his chest, and then a suffocating blackness that rose up to swallow him whole.

* * *

He woke up screaming, flat on his back, his wrists pinned down by ruthlessly strong hands. Someone was talking, someone familiar, but he couldn’t make sense of the words, couldn’t breathe or even think—

The hands gripped tighter, and the pain began to recede. Enough for him to understand that it was Derek leaning over him, repeating, “Stiles, hold still. You have to hold still. I’m going to let go of your wrists, but you have to hold still.”

It was like an echo of before, but Derek sounded considerably less panicked, so maybe he wasn’t actually going to die. That was a comforting thought, although it would have been more comforting if he couldn’t still taste blood in his mouth. If he could breathe.

“Stiles,” Derek said again, his warm hands still gripping his wrists. Not as bruisingly tight as they had been a moment ago, but still present. “Can you understand me? I need you to hold still. We’re stabilizing you, but you need to hold still.”

He could hear other voices farther away, the words overlapping an indistinct. One that sounded like Scott, although there was something strangely off about it, and another one that he felt like he should have recognized, but—

“Wh’happened?” he coughed.

“You jumped again,” Derek said, still calm. “If I let go of you, will you hold still?”

“Yeah.” He coughed again, then winced. The pain was gone, but he could still feel the way things were _shifting_ inside him with every labored breath, bones and organs that he wasn’t usually aware of making themselves horribly known. “You okay? Th’ kids?”

There was a silence, long enough that Stiles almost opened his eyes, and then Derek sighed, released his wrists, and said, “We got out okay. The Bautista kids are okay. They… they’re adjusting well.”

“Kay,” Stiles mumbled. There was still something off about how Derek sounded, but he couldn’t make his brain focus enough to tease it out. He wouldn’t flat-out lie, anyway. Not about something like this. If he said the kids were okay, they were okay. Everything else… they could work out everything else.

There were more hands on him, pressing clinically at his throat, his sides. Derek moved back. “Is it all—?”

“Yeah,” said the naggingly familiar voice that Stiles couldn’t place. A broad, bony hand flattened on the uninjured side of his chest, and another rested on his forehead. “We’re going to have to put him under.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Yeah, trust me. It’s a way better idea than the alternative.”

“Wait,” Stiles said, peeling his eyes open. He couldn’t seem to focus right, couldn’t see much of the man leaning over him other than a smear of dark hair and pale skin, like looking through a smoke-fogged mirror. “Wait, I don’t—”

“Trust me, dude,” said the man. “You really don’t want to be awake for this. Speaking from experience. You’ll be fine, but for now…” His fingers were sliding back to Stiles’s temple, something like electricity sparking from his skin. When he spoke again, his voice held strange resonances, overlapping layers of sound and meaning. “ _Go to sleep._ ”

“I don’t,” Stiles began again, and then his lips went numb and he was slipping away; he was gone.

* * *

He drifted, formless and numb, until cool marble hands gripped him tight and pulled him upright, his dangling feet just brushing the floor. His limbs felt limp, watery, useless.

_Open your eyes._

“No,” Stiles mumbled.

Cold thumbs pressed into his cheekbones. _Open your eyes._

He didn’t exactly think she’d push her fingers through his skull and into his brain, but he wasn’t sure enough to gamble on it, either. He opened his eyes. The stone goddess was peering at him from inches away. Her face was blank; this close, he could make out glittering threads of mica in her polished marble skin. Stiles licked his lips, then said all in a rush, “Oh, God, look, I’m really sorry, and I’m pretty sure I’ve learned my lesson. Thoroughly.”

 _Lesson, yes._ The goddess cupped his face with her cold stone hands, gazed at him with unblinking moon-bright eyes. The voice she spoke with used no words, but he understood it anyway. _Do you understand?_

His chest was suddenly a mass of agony again. He choked, tasting blood, tasting the memory of Derek’s mouth on his, the desperate tension in his hands, the raw, shocked, shattered expression on his face before he’d turned to leave. It was an expression he knew from the inside-out, leaving Derek to bleed out in front of _La Iglesia_ three years ago. He just. He hadn’t realized then what it meant.

“Yeah,” Stiles choked, because he did. He got it now. It was too late, but he got it. “Yeah. I understand.”

_Good._

Cool stone lips pressed against his, and then the world spun away from him and he fell into darkness.

* * *

He had no memory of landing. When he woke, he was lying on some soft, flat surface, cocooned in warmth, and somewhere nearby two people were arguing.

“This is a terrible idea, for the record.”

“It was your idea.”

“So? Since when has that ever stopped you?”

A soft sound, a breath of laughter, and then the second man said, “Maybe I trust you.”

“Maybe you’re an idiot.”

“Maybe,” the second man said. Derek. The other man was the strange not-stranger from before, but that was Derek, and he sounded amused. “Is this weird for you?”

“So fucking weird, oh my God. I mean, look at him. He’s a baby.”

Stiles twitched, shifting. There were blankets sliding over him, a clean shirt that he didn’t remember putting on, and his whole chest ached in a distantly unpleasant way. On the other side of the room, Derek said, “He’s waking up. Do you want to—”

“Oh, God, no. Unless you think I should.”

“You’re the one who remembers this,” Derek’s voice said.

“Not really. I was pretty out of it.” A pause, and then a breath of laughter, and it was still familiar in the weirdest way, but he still couldn’t put his finger on it. “ _He’s_ pretty out of it. But I think it’ll be a lot less weird if it’s you. At least for now.”

“If you’re sure,” Derek said, sounding dubious, and then there were heavy footsteps on the floor and a dark shape leaning over him. “Stiles? Are you awake?”

“No,” Stiles groaned, squeezing his eyes shut. Everything hurt. _Everything._ He felt like he’d had a building land on him, which, actually, was more or less exactly what had happened. “I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying, I promise,” Derek said, resting a hand on his arm, and the pain was leaving in a sudden sweet rush. “Better?”

“Mmprgh,” Stiles managed, and opened his eyes. “Oh, God. I could kiss you.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Derek said, but he was smiling. He was—

Older. A lot older. Crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and white in his beard, threads of silver in his dark hair, an unfamiliar softness to his sharp-featured face. Stiles didn’t actually know if werewolves aged at the same rate that humans did, but Derek looked well into his forties, at least.

“Oh,” Stiles said blankly. “This is, uh.”

“Not what you expected?” Derek finished, smile easy, and that was the same, that was startlingly identical to Derek’s— to _his_ Derek’s rare genuine smiles. “We thought it might be a shock.”

“You thought right,” Stiles rasped. “What the hell— what year is it? What’s going on?”

“2032,” Derek said, lifting his hand away. Metal shone on his ring finger: a plain gold band, like a wedding ring. Stiles felt his eyes catch on it, momentarily distracted, and when he looked back up Derek was watching him with an odd, knowing, half-amused expression. “And I really can’t tell you any more than that. You’ll be going back home soon, anyway.”

“Did—” Stiles coughed. It awoke more cramping, distant aches in his chest, but the splitting agony of before was gone, and nothing seemed to be moving in a way it shouldn’t. “Do I survive? I mean, you’re not freaking out, so I guess I do, but…”

Derek grinned at that, a quicksilver flash of teeth, and glanced behind him. “You want to take that one?”

“Oh, thanks a lot,” said the other man, but he sounded pretty amused, too. “Throw me under the bus, why don’t you.”

He knew that voice, he did. And he knew, suddenly, exactly who he was going to see when he lifted his head, but that still didn’t prepare him for actually seeing it. Him. _Himself._

The man on the far side of the room gave him a lopsided smile. He was broader in the shoulders, his dark hair longer than Stiles had ever worn it, a neatly trimmed beard shadowing his face. A dark tangle of tattoos climbed one pale arm, and when he lifted one hand in an ironic little wave, there was a glint of gold on his finger.

The mate, Stiles realized, to the ring that Derek was wearing.

He didn’t know what his face was doing, but it had to be wild, because his other self laughed out loud. “Through a mirror darkly, huh?” His voice was both familiar and not, and Stiles didn’t even know how much of that was age and how much of that was never having heard it from this angle before. “Trust me, this is pretty freakin’ weird for me, too.”

“I guess you’d know,” Stiles said blankly. “We’d know? What the hell pronoun do I even use for this?”

“Good fucking question, man.” His other self unfolded from his seat with a grace that seemed entirely alien, tilted his chin, his mouth curving into a lopsided smile. It was an expression that Stiles knew intimately from the inside, and it was— it was so fucking _weird_ to see it like this. Especially on a face that looked like it belonged to an adult, a bearded man in his late thirties and not the gangly awkward college student that Stiles recognized from his own mirror. He couldn’t keep from staring, cataloging the changes: beard, hair, a grounded steadiness in his stance that reminded him of Derek, Allison, Deaton, Braeden— that he knew damn well was the result of years and _years_ of combat training. Sixteen years worth of it, anyway. Jesus fuck.

Also: tattoos. “Did those hurt?”

The benefit of talking to someone who was, essentially, _him_ was that he didn’t have to explain the strange tangents his brain sometimes took. The other Stiles glanced down at his arm, laughed, and said, “Like hell. Although at least there wasn’t a blowtorch involved.”

“You’re still human?” Stiles asked, and when his other self gave him a look, eyebrows arched in a way that looked like he’d stolen the expression from Derek, he added, “Dude, you knocked me out with the power of your mind. I was out of it, but I remember that.”

“Yeah, you would,” Derek muttered, and when his other self snorted, turned to give him a smile that was so amused and affectionate that it made a jolt of something that was almost jealousy go through Stiles.

“So,” he said, before he could think better of it. “You two are… I mean, _we’re_ …”

Derek snorted again. He brushed a hand over Stiles’s hair, a casual, proprietary kind of gesture that pretty much entirely answered his question, stood up, and crossed the low dark room to stand near the other Stiles. It was hard to tell where they were. Nowhere that he recognized; what architecture he could see seemed industrial and utilitarian, steel beams and poured concrete, but there were odd little personal touches everywhere: plants growing in a green tangle in the barred window, clothes tossed over a chair, a backpack spilling across the floor. Some narrow transparent thing that might have been the great-great-grandchild of a tablet was mounted on a slender thread on the corner of a table, a triskelion hanging on the back of the door. A transparent dry-erase board stood askew in a corner, covered in handwriting that Stiles recognized as his own.

This wasn’t just a hideout. It was a home. _Their_ home, his and Derek’s.

“Holy shit,” he said out loud. “Seriously?”

The other him paused at the door, his fingers on the latch, and turned to look over his shoulder at Stiles, a knowing smile curving his mouth. “You’re just going to have to go find out, huh?”

“What?”

“You’ll get there,” his other self said. He reached out without looking and took Derek’s hand, lacing their fingers together, casual and intimate. “Oh, and Stiles? You’re going to be okay. _We’re_ going to be okay.”

And then they were both gone. The door swung shut, and Stiles levered himself painfully upright on the bed, listening to the sounds of two sets of footsteps echo away into the distance. He gripped the edge of the mattress with both hands, breathing in slowly and trying to settle himself into his own skin. He still felt hurt and fragile and raw, which was a feeling he was way more familiar than he wanted to be, but he wasn’t… he wasn’t _dying,_ there was nothing terribly broken inside him. He felt like he’d taken a bad tackle in a lacrosse game, not like he’d had a Claymore mine blow up in his face.

Apparently, future-him had been learning all kinds of great tricks. He peeled his shirt up to peer down at his chest, and sure enough, all that was there was a purplish scar over the right side of his rib cage. It hurt when he prodded it tentatively, but in a distant, healing kind of way, like an old bruise.

His fingers were beginning to sting.

“You could have given me a little more than that, asshole,” he said out loud, and he thought, just maybe, that he heard a distant bark of laughter before the world slid away from him.

* * *

He landed in the middle of his driveway in a puff of oppressive heat and the thick smell of fresh asphalt. Derek’s Camaro was still parked three feet away from him, its gleaming black surface dull with road dust and grime. Stiles levered himself painfully upright, squinting in the sudden brightness, and swore softly under his breath when the movement torqued the sore muscles in his chest.

The front door banged open.

Scott leapt down from the porch without bothering with the stairs at all, Derek an instant behind him. Stiles barely had time to take a breath before they converged on him, too-strong hands hauling him to his feet and then steadying him with sudden gentleness. Scott wrapped him into a quick hard hug and then stepped back, his eyes huge, his smile bright and relieved. “You’re okay. Oh, man, you scared the hell out of us, but you’re okay, right?”

“I’m okay.” Stiles looked at Derek and added, grinning a little, “Want me to take my shirt off and show you?”

Derek was staring at him with an expression that was almost frightening in its intensity. For a long moment, he didn’t answer, and then he stepped forward into Stiles’s space and slowly, gently, pushed the hem of his t-shirt up to expose the right side of his chest. His fingers rested just above the healing injury, barely brushing his skin, a light touch that made Stiles shiver. He breathed in slowly, feeling his heart rate kick up.

“See?” he said, throat dry. “I told you. I’m okay.”

“You were healed.”

“Yep.”

Finally, Derek lifted his head. He was so close that Stiles could pick out every shade of green in his eyes, the line of dirt at his hairline where he’d missed washing up earlier, so close that he could feel the unnatural heat radiating off of him. His fingers still rested on Stiles’s skin. “I told you to run. You didn’t.”

“Come on,” Stiles said. “You knew I wouldn’t. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“I told you to _run_ ,” Derek repeated, and then he was hauling Stiles into a crushing hug, face pressed into the side of his neck, hands fisting in his t-shirt. Stiles flailed for a second, then wrapped his arms around Derek’s broad back.

He met Scott’s eyes over his shoulder, and after a brief and silent conversation, Scott cleared his throat and said, “I’ll go talk to Deaton.”

“Thanks, buddy,” Stiles said, and dropped his head onto Derek’s shoulder, closed his eyes, breathed him in. “You kinda reek,” he murmured, and pressed his lips to the curve of Derek’s neck, tasting the salt on his skin.

Derek’s chest quaked slightly, but the noise he made didn’t exactly sound like a laugh. “I haven’t exactly had time to shower. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry, I love you anyway,” Stiles said, then made a face without lifting his head. “I mean…”

“Don’t,” Derek interrupted softly. His hand slid up into Stiles’s hair, cupping the back of his skull like he was holding something precious, and his beard scraped against Stiles’s cheek as they turned, sliding together into a kiss that felt unhurried, inevitable.

“So,” Stiles said, when they finally broke apart. “Um.”

Derek was just looking at him. All of the tension from earlier seemed to have bled away, and his expression was painfully soft in a way that made Stiles want to flush and squirm, that made him want to brush it off with a joke. Just this once, though, he managed to resist the urge.

“You’re okay,” Derek said finally, like he was just now allowing himself to believe it.

“I’m okay.” Stiles remembered his other self— his future self— standing in the doorway with Derek, the way their bodies had moved together, the easy, familiar intimacy of it, and smiled. “It’s a long story— a long, _weird_ story— but I think we’re both going to be okay.”

*

FIN

 

**Author's Note:**

> I've tried to make the narrative comprehensible without Spanish translations, but in case you're curious, here they are (and please note that my Spanish is far from fluent, so if I've made any mistakes here, feel free to let me know - ETA, thank you to Seira for the corrections!):
> 
>  _Esperen._ \- Wait.
> 
>  _Deberiamos apurarnos._ \- We should hurry.
> 
>  _Alguien está aquí._ \- Somebody's here.
> 
>  _Vamos, es seguro._ \- Come on, it's safe.
> 
>  _Eso es lo que te dije. Es otro cazador?_ \- That's what I told you. Is he another hunter?
> 
>  _Es un amigo. Vamos._ \- He's a friend. Come on.
> 
>  _No lo toquen. Entienden?_ \- Don't touch it. Understand?
> 
>  _Sí, entendemos._ \- Yes, we understand.
> 
>  _Bien. Vamos._ \- Good. Come on.
> 
>  _Van a matarnos como mataron a Mamá—_ \- They're going to kill us like they killed Mama.
> 
>  _No van a matar a nadie. Corran!_ \- They're not going to kill anybody. Run!
> 
> *
> 
> I can be found on tumblr as [glorious-spoon](http://glorious-spoon.tumblr.com/). If you enjoyed this story, please take a moment to let me know! Thanks for reading!


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